


The Last House On The Left

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Actual Death Experiences, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Angst, Found Family Trope Strikes Back, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Near Death Experiences, No One Is Human, Supernatural Elements, as do like 16 others, mostly?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-06-08 22:44:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 59,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15253683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: Once you venture into the dark, rarely do you come back out. It’s no different for them.





	1. How You Come To Be

There is no becoming in Dimara Vespoli’s life.

She has it, by far, the easiest. Nephilim are not widely feared, they’re renowned, and no one goes running from them in the night.

She never actually meets her father, but that seems to be a common thing. Angels don’t stick around once they’re finished. Why would they stay here, with their feet on the ground, when the sky existed?

She is born, like millions of other children in this world. Raised by a mother who spends so many years explaining what she is and what she’s capable of and how even though she is not to be feared there are still people out there who would hurt her, given the opportunity for it.

Her mother dies when she’s seven, car accident, and she moves from middle of nowhere, Alaska to Portland, Maine. Her grandmother lives there, the only surviving relative she knows she has.

Dimara’s never met her.

She grows up in a life that doesn’t even seem real. She can do everything everyone else does but she’s stronger and she’s faster and she watches her grandmother kill the bad ones, whenever they come around. And they come around often. Maine seems to be crawling with them, same way Alaska was. Too much woods for things to hide in. You never know what’s looking at you from the shadows, or what’s gonna come knocking on your door.

Her grandmother has lived in an apartment three stories up for nearly forty years now. Dimara doesn’t ask what happened to her grandfather. She isn’t sure she wants to know.

Leaving the city and going out anywhere on your own is dangerous, if you’re a human. You stay in the city, where it’s safer. Out here there’s colonies of everything. Wendigos and banshees in caves along the coast, selkies who will pull you into the tide without a second thought. She spends eleven years listening to the city go quiet at night and wondering just how much is happening outside, where the eye cannot see.

Two days after her twenty-first birthday, her grandmother dies.

She was old, she spent years hunting whatever monsters still exist and teaching her to do the same. Dimara didn’t think she’d die in her sleep, easy and quiet in the middle of the night, but everything about that woman managed to surprise her.

There’s a will she didn’t know about. All the money and the possessions and an address with a key, for a rental property less than ten miles to the east, out in Cape Elizabeth.

Dimara figures she’s got nothing better to do.

—

—

—

Blair cannot remember a single thing, about the before.

The worst part is, he can’t even remember dying. Or getting attacked. Obviously, he did, or he wouldn’t still be here, but the actual event is nothing but a very blank hole right in the back of his head, something that constantly lingers.

What he doesn’t know is that he was another statistic, back before those even really existed. In 1740 a kid starts spreading news about having seen something off in the woods, and he spends four years wondering how much of it was the truth before one of those things drains him dry and then kills him in the alleyway behind the church.

Which is kind of ironic, if you really think about it.

He wakes up in a morgue.

The nurse out in the hall sounds very nice, very pleasant. Talking to some crying relative. He still kills her, because the second she comes in the room it’s the only thing he can think of. The only thing he can _smell._

He finds out the hard way, why the kid saw so many of his kind, out in the woods. Most of them spend the first few years after the change feral, killing everything and anything they see before they learn how to reign it in, to control it. One minuscule remaining shred of their human brain remains, enough to tell them to put distance between them and the humans.

Less damage that way. Less bloodshed.

Blair doesn’t go into the woods.

—

—

—

Nadir remembers every too-long second from the first time she died.

It’s the ones after that that start to blur.

She always thought Thane would wind up killing her one day, she just didn’t think it would go like this. She thought it would be an accident.

This isn’t an accident.

The very last thing she remembers about her life is his hands on her throat, and that’s it. She can’t remember what he looked like in the moment before she went under for good, but she can see his face before the initial strike, when she wakes up in a coffin somewhere between two and five feet in the earth. She dies twice more before she gets out. Once because she panics and uses up all the air too fast, and the second time when she’s halfway up through the earth, the dirt suffocating her lungs, heavy in her mouth.

She lies on the dewy grass in the middle of the cemetery for hours and only leaves because she sees a gravedigger, far off on the western edge, and doesn’t want to be asked questions she doesn’t have answers for.

She can feel something in her, when she wanders the streets. Something burning and growing, encouraged by her thoughts. It’s several days later. The two feet of snow is melted through now, but it couldn’t have been that long, if news hasn’t spread about her death.

She doesn’t realize where her feet are taking her until that feeling ignites back up again, threatening to scorch her from the inside out. She doesn’t knock. The dirt on the bottom of her bare feet leaves marks through the front hall, all the way to where Thane is standing.

When he turns, the glass in his hand falls. Shatters to the floor.

She can’t imagine what’s running through his head right now, looking her in the eye. He looks like he’s seen the anti-christ, which isn’t as far off as either of them know then, and even when he opens his mouth, lips stuttering around a word or a sentence that he never gets out, she still doesn’t know what he’s thinking.

She thinks nothing, of burning down the house with him in it.

—

—

—

Kelsea’s family has lived in the woods along Maine's coast for thousands of years.

The trees stand where they do because of them, and yet everyone fears the woods regardless. For every good thing there’s three bad things. That’s what people say.

She doesn’t often venture into actual civilization, because she knows what people think. Fairies are tricky, malevolent creatures who lure people into the woods and don’t let them back out at night, and once you’re in there at night you’re in there for good.

That kind _exist_ , there's no denying that, but she's not one of them. She helped create the plants and fostered the animals and flowers grow underneath her feet when she touches the ground long enough. From here to a hundred miles away, that's what _she_ helped create.

And for the longest time, as long as they stay hidden in the woods, no one bugs them. There's no one living anywhere close to where Kelsea's family settles down after fifty years, save for the old woman that occasionally comes and patches up the fence to the great big house in the clearing, but that's it.

The woman stops coming.

That’s how life works. A human life, anyway. Kelsea will never die of a natural cause, the way that woman probably did. She never spoke to her. She always spent most of her time outside, when she showed up, in a Sedan straight out of the 80’s. She never went inside.

She never stays, either. Whether or not Kelsea disappears back into the woods the car is always gone by the time she comes back, when the sun sets.

So the woman dies, and Kelsea stops going, until a hurricane passes through and nearly takes half the forest with it. She suddenly has this strange, desperate desire to go check on the house, and finds it mostly intact save for a few uprooted bushes and missing shingles.

Kelsea doesn't tell anyone when she sees a face in the window.

—

—

—

Tanis is a Fable in a family full of humans.

It's usually the other way around. Sometimes the blood will skip a generation; rarely does the blood just appear from nowhere and create something in a place where it shouldn't exist.

Her parents take it surprisingly well, considering there's always an alarming amount of purple smoke whenever she screws something up, a foul odor in the air when something spends too long stewing.

They don't have a choice to take it well, is the issue. It's that or give her up, which they won't do no matter how concerned they are. They most definitely wanted a normal-blooded human as a child, not her.

She's one of four witches still left in the western woods. Their type is becoming a rare breed, nearing extinction after a group of hunters cleaned out the main coven in Augusta two years back. She'd been seeing the future a lot, a newer development, but she sees nothing of it coming. After that she trusts the visions even less.

She didn't want to spend her life hiding. That's not her. She also doesn't really have a choice, unless she wants their extinction to take a small step closer. Her parents live just off the main road and she finds herself living in a dilapidated old cabin very far into the treeline, where no one will see her unless they’re really looking.

It makes sense, in the end, that one of the only things rarer than she is finds her.

—

—

—

Celia doesn’t know how long she’s existed.

It’s not something she really thinks about, either. She knows she won’t ever die. How could she possibly die, when she doesn’t remember popping into existence in the first place?

Angels are weird, she decides eventually. Kind of an insult, considering she is one, but for being an ethereal kingdom it sure does feel like nothing ever happens. They watch a lot of people pass on. Mostly humans. The Fabled must go somewhere else, somewhere closer to hell. That’s probably what they deserve.

Maybe it’s that thought that gets her cast out, because thinking back on it, she can’t recall what else it could have been.

Then again, she doesn’t recall much, when she’s falling.

—

—

—

Rory has never left the ocean.

He’s seen so many people go, over the course of twenty years. A lot of the younger members of the colony living off the edge of the Cape, a few adults. They’re so hard to find that they rarely lose people, except to the land.

A lot of them go for the fun of it. Some of them take human lovers and never come back. Sometimes it goes past that and they settle down, find a job, have kids.

For a long time, Rory’s shocked at how little of them come back, when he could never imagine leaving in the first place. He thinks of them dying old and withered in bed with two human legs and can’t ever manage to wrap his brain around it.

He knows where he belongs. He belongs under the waves where nothing bad ever happens and where no one can bring any harm their way. The ones who leave are just different, that’s all, and he’s fine with being different.

He doesn’t want to leave.

It’s dark, nearing midnight, when something crashes into the ocean above him so hard the water seems to shake. He sees the bright burst of fire extinguished as whatever it is sinks below the waves.

He doesn’t want to leave, but he also has no idea, about how much everything is going to change.

—

—

—

Rooke can’t remember how long he’s been alone, up in the house on the hill.

When he sees the unfamiliar car coming up the long, winding drive, he hides.

—

—

—

That night, Vance goes for a walk at the edge of the woods, alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The most long-winded AU about a technical AU that you'll ever stumble across in your goddamn life.
> 
> If anybody random does stumble upon it and wants take a chance at reading, this is an AU of a still on-going Hunger Games fic called [Apocalypse Now](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12719406/1/Apocalypse-Now) if anyone likes that., that can be found on my fanfiction account under the same name. You don't need to read that to understand this. Not that anyone's going to understand it anyway.
> 
> This is basically just a collection of "smaller" fics and one-shots, but that didn't work out so well. Not that it ever does. I'll be posting an update of this about once every two weeks.
> 
> And yes, they're all named after horror movies that I've never watched, nor will I ever. I'm a baby.


	2. The House On The Hill

_Three Days Earlier._

It takes Dimara less than nine minutes to drive to Cape Elizabeth.

It takes her forty-five minutes to find the damn turnoff.

She only decides to drive this way because the funeral didn't take very long, and she's got to deal with a rental property that she didn't know existed. The Cape doesn't have a very high population, but everything is annoyingly spread out, the woods hiding nearly every house from view.

Eventually she stops at one of the only convenience stores in the area and the gangly, half-asleep teenager points her half a mile down the road.

It's no wonder she kept missing it. There's no address, no mailbox, no sign indicating that it's a drive at all. She can see the ocean through the trees, where the road ends, but it quickly disappears once she turns down the driveway.

It seems to go on forever, the road winding through the trees. It's very dark all of a sudden, with so much of the sky obscured, but she can see it lightening up ahead, where the trees end and open up into a sprawling field, dotted with flowers and birds and everything else very stereotypically pretty.

The house at the very end of the drive was hard to describe as that.

For as old as it had to be it was in relatively good shape, save for the storm that must have pulled some things up. The siding looked as if it had been painted recently, the cracks in the sidewalk free of any overgrown weeds.

There's also not another thing in sight.

There's no car in the driveway. The details said it was a rental property, but it doesn't really look like one. Her grandmother never mentioned it, either. She came up this way on weekends a lot, to check up on a friend, but that was it.

Dimara still parks the car and gets out, even though knocking seems futile. When she climbs the uneven front steps and peers into the window, she continues to think it. There's a fine layer of dust over everything; the inside looks ten times older than the outside does. She _does_ knock a few times just in case, but no one comes to answer the door. She pulls out the key. If someone _does_ live here and happens to come back, they can't really be mad, can they? The house belongs to her now.

It's even dustier than she imagined.

 The light in the hall turns on easy enough, even though it looks like it shouldn't. It illuminates every single damn dust mote in the entire place. There's no telling how old this place is, but it's gotta be up there. Apparently, no one's considered renovating since then either. There's still wood paneling on the walls, for the love of god.

No coats hanging on the hooks, no shoes underneath. Every part of the floor creaks when she steps off the front rug.

It doesn't even feel right to be in here but trust her grandmother to find the weirdest and oldest house in a hundred-mile radius and decide she wants it.

But there's no way someone can live here. There's hardly any food in the cupboards, and she's not sure how someone could survive without a toaster oven. It doesn't look like the remote’s been moved off the coffee table in a year. Upstairs there are bedrooms _everywhere_ _,_ all the beds made, no clothes in the closet.

Except for one.

“Hello?”

She nearly falls back down the stairs.

The voice is quite small and nervous, but it still nearly gives her a proper heart attack, and she clutches at the bannister as she turns around, to the person standing nearly out of sight in the bathroom doorway. To think she walked past there just a minute ago.

“Jesus Christ,” she snaps, and watches the guy swallow. He doesn’t look that much younger than her, but it’s how pale he looks when he swallows, eyes following her nervously, that gets her.

“How did you get in here?”

“I have a _key_. Did you not hear me knock?”

He doesn’t answer. She isn’t sure how she’s supposed to feel about that.

“So, you’re telling me someone does actually live here?” she asks, and after a moment he nods hesitantly. “Who are you?”

Again, with that extremely awkward silence. She may be holding onto the railing, but he’s got both hands holding onto the edge of the door with a pressure that’s going to be nearly strong enough to crack the whole thing in two, if he keeps at it.

It’s like someone’s sewn his mouth shut.

“Dimara,” she offers, “I’m Madeline’s grand-daughter. She passed away last week.”

“Oh,” he says, sadly, but at least his eyes light up with some amount of recognition. “I’m sorry.”

She’s had a lot of people say sorry to her, this morning. To be honest, she’s tiring of it.

“I’m Rooke,” he says. “You just – you kinda freaked me out. Sorry.”

“Yeah, you’re telling me,” she mutters. And then, because she can’t possibly get it out of her mind, “how do you live without a toaster oven?”

His eyebrows furrow. “A what?”

“You know, like an oven. Except smaller.”

She’s also remembering how there was hardly nothing in the cupboards, literally nothing in the fridge. There’s a few pieces of glassware, but not much. Now that he’s beginning to cautiously lean out of the doorway, it’s hard not to notice how thin he is. He’s young, too, living on his own when even she wasn’t just yet. His reaction to her was something, but he didn’t look like he was about to beat her back out the front door.

He still looks scared. The hallway is very dark. In this light he’s quite hard to see.

“How much did she charge you to live here?”

“She didn’t.”

Dimara was beginning to suspect that, looking at him. Hardly any food, barely anything at all touched. She thinks of her grandmother driving down here all the time to check on someone, and she always stopped at the grocery store before—

“What do you like to eat?” she asks, and he blinks owlishly at her. “I was getting hungry anyway, so is there anything particular, or?”

“Uh, you don’t have to get me anything,” he starts, but she’s already pulling her keys back out of her purse and headed down the stairs.

“It’s no big deal, seriously. Just tell me what you want.”

He shrugs when she turns back to him. He’s at least come creeping out of the bathroom now and is leaning over the stairs to watch her as she goes. She kind of figured he wouldn’t give her a straight-forward answer.

“Well, I won’t be long. Don’t go anywhere.”

He gives her a very hesitant thumbs up, and then darts back down the hallway.

She stares.

Teenager, probably, living in a house by himself, almost no food, no other signs of life, no wonder he’s weird. She’d probably be weird too. He doesn’t look like he’s been outside in a while, either. Lack of human contact will do that to you.

A lack of human contact can probably be named as the reason for why half the world is no longer one.

—

—

—

Dimara is gone for much longer than she expected to be.

She had to drive back to Portland anyway, to find a fast food restaurant that either wasn’t under renovation after the storm or creepier than the house was.

Things predictably go downhill from there, once she remembers all the money she just got left.

She spends nearly an hour not quite arguing with a bank teller, who looks very reluctant to dump a very large sum of money into her bank account. Fair enough. He finally concedes when an old, haggard woman comes walking in, and spends the next ten minutes staring at him. Banshee, probably. He transfers the money and disappears.

She fills the car up with gas, and then the entire trunk with groceries. She goes off in search of a toaster oven, because she can’t manage to not be irritated about it, and then goes home. Changes out of her funeral clothes into something more comfortable, and then puts a pair of pajamas and a change of clothes into a backpack with her toiletries, before she heads back out.

It’s predictably pissing down rain by the time she goes and gets the food, nearly drops the drinks in her lap, and then eats half her fries before she hits the turnoff for the driveway, because now she really is starving.

The porchlight is on, which is a good sign. He didn’t go running.

She doesn’t know why she’s doing this, other than the fact that her grandmother would probably want her to. Clearly, she spent a decent chunk of her time taking care of him, and she wouldn’t have left Dimara the key and the address if she didn’t want her going there.

Logic. That’s what she’s sticking with.

Rooke, much to her shock and awe, opens the door before she even gets back up on the porch.

“You should probably do that in as few trips as possible,” he tells her quietly, like he saw the full trunk coming, and she forces the fast food bags on him.

“Why?”

“Lots of stuff out in the woods when it gets dark.”

“Like what?”

“Fairy colony. Dryads, you know. A few fauns. Leprechauns, sometimes. I heard there were a few wendigos, too, and I saw a harpy once—”

“Yep, that’s good.” She cuts him off and heads back to the car. As few trips as possible it is, then. She doesn’t fail to notice how Rooke takes the two bags she handed him in and then never comes back out. Why bother telling her to hurry, if he’s not going to _help?_

She manages to get all the groceries up the front steps without falling over and dumps them all over the kitchen table. Rooke blinks at the load, and then grabs a bag when it starts to slip off the edge. He’s still staring blankly when she heads back to grab her bag, and then wrestles the toaster oven box into the crook of her other arm.

She locks the car, and then the door, once she steps inside. The curtain on the little window is blowing in the leftover breeze, and she draws it shut.

Rooke is very carefully unloading things and putting them away, looking at some things for a very long second, reading the labels. He glances up from the package of cookies he’s holding when she comes back in, eyeing the box.

“Toaster oven,” she explains, and places it on the counter. “Go eat, I’ll do this.”

For the first time since she got here, it almost looks as if he’s about to say something back that isn’t filled with fear. He doesn’t, though, and hands her the cookies before he gingerly picks up the two fast food bags and the tray of drinks and leaves the kitchen.

It’s silent except for the rain while she’s putting stuff away for maybe ten minutes, before she hears the television click on. The rhythmic, above-whisper voice nearly startles her. It’s not very hard to be, when she can’t even hear him eating. Crinkling the bag. Anything. All she hears is the noise of cans hitting the shelves as she shoves them pretty much anywhere, bare as the cupboards currently are.

At first, he doesn’t look up when she sits down on the opposite couch in the living room, the table between them. He’s picking up the fries with a very careful intensity and then munching on them with all the speed of a snail. He’s halfway through one when he notices how she shoves the backpack between her feet.

“I thought I would stay here, just for tonight. If that’s alright with you. Tomorrow I can take you back to Portland, to the mall, if you want? I figured you’d need some stuff besides food, but I wouldn’t know what.”

He keeps inching the fry into his mouth, and then picks up the drink. Takes the longest sip of her honest to god life before he puts it down on the table. Probably trying to think up something to say. It’s giving him a lot of time.

“You don’t – you don’t have to do that,” he says, an echo of his earlier words. “I don’t need anything.”

“Are you sure?”

He shrugs, and then crams another fry into his mouth.

“If you give me a list, I could—”

He’s shaking his head before she’s even finished. Apparently, he should’ve added himself to that list of things out in the forest. _Woodland hermit_.

“Well,” she says slowly. “I’d appreciate if you’d let me stay. At least let me make you like, breakfast or something, so I don’t feel shitty.”

“It’s your house.”

No comment on the breakfast thing, but anything that isn’t an outright refusal is great in her books. The house is still in her grandmother’s name, so it’s not technically hers, and who knows how long Rooke has lived here.

It’s not hers at all.

Her own food goes half cold while she watches him eat, and he dutifully avoids looking at her and watches the weather forecast like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever set eyes on in his life, outside of the toaster oven.

She still needs to hook that up.

He doesn’t move until she’s finished all her food, and then picks up all the empty bags and wrappers without even asking and goes to throw them all out, she assumes. While he’s back in the kitchen she hears him opening the cupboards, and then the fridge. Looking at everything she’s put in there. She is fully ready for him to sneak back up the stairs without her noticing, but he pops just half of his head back around the corner and waits for her to look back.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” he murmurs. “See you in the morning.”

He doesn’t wait for a response. She doesn’t hear him go back up the stairs, but she hears a door shut, a few seconds later.

She takes a sip of her drink.

Is it in the genetics, finding the weirdest human beings that exist in the state of Maine, or is that the angel blood that does that? Is she just meant to find them all? At the rate she’s going, it seems like it. This has been a good distraction, though. All her friends are trying to console and comfort her and Rooke might have apologized but at least he’s not all over her. Something she’s beginning to suspect he’s not even capable of.

She doesn’t really have it set in the back of her mind to fall asleep on the couch, but it’s late and there’s a blanket lying over top of it and she thinks if she goes upstairs Rooke will have a meltdown behind his closed door. Besides, it feels weird to just invade an empty room and claim it for herself? Like she said, this house still isn’t really hers. It doesn’t feel like it is.

She lets herself go back to sleep, after dragging the blanket down over top of her, and dutifully ignores how silent the house is.

How dark.

—

—

—

She hears Rooke’s footsteps come down the stairs in the middle of the night, at a rapid pace.

She only half-recognizes it, until he comes rushing into the living room, shoves himself into the space behind the couch at her head and the end table, and pushes the curtain open.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she mutters. There’s a little bit of a glow reflected on his face, his slightly parted mouth.

“There’s something in the sky.”

She hauls herself up with an irritated sigh, clinging to the back cushion until she can prop her chin up on it. He’s not wrong. There is something in the sky, and it’s very close. It’s on fire, and that’s the orange glow they can both see now, although the nearly full moon is still brighter. Maybe a half mile out, where the ocean starts. It disappears behind the tops of the trees, but Rooke keeps looking, so she looks up at him.

“Looked like a meteorite,” she informs him, and his eyes narrow.

She flops back down on the couch and tries immensely hard not to be weirded out by how damn long he continues standing there, just behind her head. At least she can’t feel his eyes on her, so that’s a plus. It’s nothing weirder than anything he’s done so far, so it’s not like she’s particularly surprised by it.

“Go back to sleep,” she says, and he says something so quietly under his breath that she doesn’t even hear him, but she doesn’t get the chance to question him before he pushes the curtain back into place and trudges up the stairs.

She rolls onto her side to stare at his retreating back. He hits the top of the stairs and glances back, even though the curtain’s closed. He flinches when he notices her looking at him, and then disappears.

He seems to do that an awful lot.

Apparently, it’s something she should just get used to, instead of being surprised by it.

—

—

—

The house doesn’t seem nearly as imposing in the morning.

She opens some of the curtains to let the soft, dawn light filter in. There’s no sign of any movement coming from upstairs, but it’s still early, and she doesn’t think Rooke will be any too eager to either come down and interact with her or get outright bullied into going back to Portland with her.

Dimara does sit there for a long while, and wait, but can’t really expect someone to be up at the crack of dawn just because she is.

She really should have thought to get some cleaning supplies. Or even just a Swiffer.

Eventually she gets bored of wandering the house in circles, and upon finding a few leftover sticky notes in her purse, sticks one on the fridge and leaves him a note. _Just going for a walk to the beach, won’t be gone long._

Maybe he’ll feel inclined to come after her, if she leaves a note.

Probably not.

Walking the driveway all the way back will take a while, and there’s a path snaking off into the woods not far from it, headed closer back to the main road. All of those things that Rooke said are out there won’t attack someone in broad daylight, especially not so close to the road. She’s not about to waste an hour hiking up back to the road when the beach is only a half mile away.

Her grandmother taught her not to fear the woods. Half the things out there aren’t particularly dangerous, and the other half will be able to smell the angel blood coming. They won’t attack something that will fight back.

Besides, now that it’s not a day of mourning or storming, it’s quite nice. The trees don’t seem so thick in the daylight, and the surrounding clearing is filled with the sounds of birds, and the sunlight slowly drying whatever water remains. The closer to the road she gets on the path the more footprints she starts to see. People probably walk this way all the time. The locals, anyway. Someone from Portland wouldn’t be caught dead walking out this way, alone, unarmed.

There are other things, though. A wide tree branch snapped clean in two high above in the canopy, from something landing on it. A few different footprints in the mud – hooves and claws extending forward a full inch.

Going into the woods in this world is just accepting that something will always exist, just out of your range of vision, where you can’t see it. That’s how they like it.

She can see the ocean, through the gaps in the trees, and the soft mud underfoot is slowly beginning to give way to sand, her feet sinking into it nonetheless. There weren’t as many things moving through the undergrowth the closer she got, and she could smell the salt in the air as opposed to the damp forest and mud. The ocean this way was nicer than most things. After a while, especially after spending so many years here, the earth got tiring to look at.

But the ocean always looked different.

Dimara slips off her shoes at the edge of the dunes and scoops them up, headed down closer to the water. The lighthouse is far off to her left, probably the only distinctive landmark the Cape has, one of the docks not far to her right. The water has finally calmed, now that the storm has receded, although the beach is still littered with garbage and twisted chunks of driftwood, stones and shells sharp underfoot.

There’s not a single other person down here this early, which is kind of a relief. Human wise, the people here all seem way too nice, and she’s not in the mood for casual conversation right now.

The waves against her toes is the only thin she really needs, right now. They wake her up that last little bit before they slip back down into the rest of the ocean. The sun is much warmer down here than it is up on the hill, for whatever reason. Everything up there just feels cooler, like the feeling of a shiver going up and down your spine repeatedly.

Dimara hadn’t thought there was anyone down here, but the more she walks, she realizes she was wrong. There’s a pair of people so far down she can hardly make them out and someone lying under the shadow of the dock, unmoving.

She stops. The water laps over her feet again.

She doesn’t know how long she stands there, waiting for the person to move. To get up. Do anything, even just shift against the sand, but it never comes. The couple off in the distance continues getting further and further away, so she doesn’t feel any rush to approach, to find out what’s going on.

But she has to. She glances back up at the path, and can hardly see where it begins anymore, from this distance.

She starts walking closer, her footsteps loud enough on the sand that any normal person would have opened their eyes by now to see who was coming so close to them, but this girl doesn’t. She’s further away from the water than Dimara is, sand sticking to every inch of exposed skin. It almost looks like she was in the water but has since dried off, but if she was under the dock this entire time it would have taken a while.

Her eyes remain closed even when Dimara leans over her, trying to figure out what the flying fuck is going on. It’s a possibility that she’s just drunk, and her friends forgot about her and left her here but is that something that usually happens here? Her long shirt is torn to shreds, too, which Dimara doesn’t notice until she very carefully crouches down by her side, almost afraid to startle any sudden movement out of her. It doesn’t even look like she’s wearing pants, either, and hey, to each their own, but none of that adds up.

Did she fall off the dock, then, and into the water? If she managed to get out then this would’ve been about the spot the tide rose up to, where she would have stopped crawling.

Her breathing is very shallow, which is the most worrying bit, and Dimara reaches out to gently tilt her onto her side, just in case there’s any leftover water in her lungs.

She should probably call the cops, she reckons. Or an ambulance.

Or at least, that’s what she thinks, until she sees the marks on her back.

The shirt is nearly non-existent across her back, the few edges left blackened to a crisp, two twin gashes stretching from just inside her shoulder blades nearly to the small of her back, half an inch wide on either side. They’re not bleeding at all, no blood under the sand where she was lying even though her skin is torn and opened up, bone and muscle visible underneath.

That wasn’t a meteorite last night.

Dimara’s head snaps up. The couple is out of sight, now, but when she looks over her shoulder there’s someone down on the opposite end, looking directly at the two of them. The road’s the opposite way, so he either came down the same path she did, or he just walked right out of the woods.

He’s still staring at them, and he’s not that far away.

Dimara has to make a split-second decision, and not panic when she does it.

She scoops the girl, still unmoving, up into her arms, suddenly very grateful for the angel blood making her stronger and faster than any normal person. She can’t go back to the path because he’s in the way, so she’ll have to head to the road, and then get back into the woods before anyone sees them. If someone sees her they’re _both_ done for, and Dimara’s extremely fine where she is, thank you very much.

It’s a little terrifying, how limp the girl is in her arms. Just a little old fallen angel, no big deal, and she’s not at fooled at the fact that the girl looks about the same age she is. She’s not.

Whoever’s standing down at the far end of the beach never starts after her, but he doesn’t look away either. She can help but continue to look over her shoulder, waiting for the sudden movement of him starting after them, but he doesn’t.

Absentmindedly, she really hopes that Rooke is awake by now.

If not, he’s in for it.

—

—

—

“Rooke!” she shouts, the second she opens the door. It hits the wall behind it with a thud, and then she nearly smacks the girl’s head into the doorframe.

Her arms are starting to get tired, alright?

She hears the fridge shut, and then Rooke very hesitantly looks around the corner, eyes wide. They only widen further when he sees exactly what she’s holding onto, and then he drops the plastic cup he was holding. It’s thankfully empty.

“Shut the door,” she manages, and he listens immediately. “And then get my stuff off the couch.”

She doesn’t know what the hell she’s supposed to do.

“What is that?”

“It’s a person,” she answers, which she’s not sure Rooke quite believes. It’s not a total lie. Somewhere in the process of him moving her bag off the couch and picking up the blanket he must notice the girl’s back, because he goes alarmingly still, fingers white knuckled around the edge of the blanket.

“There’s no chance you have a first-aid kit, is there?”

He shakes his head, and that seems to shake him out of everything, as he shoves all the pillows out of the way and then she lays her down on the couch, as gently as possible. It’s not like first-aid is really going to do anything. She’ll heal on her own, angels always do. That’s if they’re given the opportunity to, before a doctor or a scientist or some religious nutcase finds them and never lets them go.

“Where did you find her?”

“On the beach.”

“You carried her all the way back here?”

His voice is suspicious, even though he’s realized by now, that what they saw last night was her and not just a random circumstance. There’s no time to really look at him and tell him to calm down, though, when he’s not the priority.

Rooke is fine. This person is not.

“Are you— are you, you know, like her?”

“Halfway.”

“Oh,” he murmurs quietly. “That explains a lot.”

“What the fuck does that explain?” she asks wildly, but he’s already gone by the time she turns around. Not nearly enough, she doesn’t think, but it’s helped Rooke with whatever he’s thinking. Great for him. She can hear him fiddling around in the kitchen now, and the sound of the tap running before he returns with a bowl of water, and a washcloth. He reaches out like he’s certain she’s going to bite him, even unconscious, or maybe it’s her he’s worried about now that he knows, and brushes some of the sand off her shoulders.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t deal with this every day, you know.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he starts, sounding a bit bewildered. “Have you ever dealt with it? At all?”

She’s met one fallen in her life, and her grandmother let the guy sleep in their spare bedroom for nearly a week before the cops showed up and took him, after a neighbor tipped them off. They’re not dangerous to society, not unless they want to be, but they’re different. A lot less real than everyone else down here, which is saying something, for a society full of supernatural creatures.

She holds out her hand for the cloth instead of answering, and he doesn’t fight her on it. She very gently pushes away some of the sand from the open wounds. Can angels get infected? Is that a thing that can happen?

Her grandmother taught her a lot but sue her for listening more to the physical part of the teaching rather than all of the facts inserted in-between.

“What is she going to do when she wakes up?”

“Probably ask you why you’re standing there staring at her, because I have a feeling you’re still going to be doing it when that time finally rolls around.”

He frowns at that but doesn’t move. Further proving her point.

There’s really nothing they can do, until the girl wakes up. Once that happens Dimara’s still not sure there’s going to be a clear path, as if there ever is.

“I didn’t make you breakfast,” she sighs, and Rooke shoves his hands into his pocket, shrugging his shoulders. It nearly knocks the hood of his sweater back, and he reaches back to grab it. She doesn’t think he’s ever slipped it off.

“It’s fine.”

Nothing about this is fine.

—

—

—

She’s no better than Rooke, at the end of the day. There’s nothing to do but leave her there, so Dimara rotates between the other couch, the armchair, and the floor when she gets bored. She does make breakfast eventually, several hours later, and makes Rooke sit in the living room the whole time, which she’s sure he’s not pleased about.

She’d like to go home and get more clothes, because it’s looking like she’s staying for longer than she thought.

The thought of leaving Rooke alone with this girl when she wakes up is more concerning than her lack of clothes.

They rotate a lot through the day. Bathroom breaks and refilling drinks and finally, once the sun has set and she’s starting to feel tired again, Rooke tells her to go to sleep. He’s on the couch and she’s on the floor and definitely not about to go upstairs.

Rooke slides away enough that she can grab one of the pillows he was leaning on and shoves it under her head. The floor’s not particularly comfortable, but it’ll do, at least for tonight. Rooke’s produced a book from somewhere, and she focuses on him flipping the pages occasionally and closes her eyes.

The only thing more tiring than the apologies is actually, consistently getting woken up in the middle of the night.

Something hits the floor a few feet away from her head, and she jolts awake so fast her head spins. The light’s off, now – Rooke must have switched it off after she fell asleep. Her back is aching from lying on the floor, and despite the jolt she’s still not faster than Rooke, who leaps off the couch, manages to kick her, and then hops right over her.

She turns onto her hands and knees and then fumbles up and to the right, for the switch to the lamp. Her hand swings through the air a few times before she turns, already growing annoyed, to find the lamp no longer there. That’s what’s on the floor, although it hasn’t shattered. And the girl, who’s head had been a foot away from said lamp when Dimara had laid her down on the couch, is no longer laying down at all.

Rooke reaches the hall light.

It snaps on, and Dimara can see her clearer now. She’s managed to get to her feet, but her knees are shaking, Dimara realizes, and she fumbles back for the table to keep her balance.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” she starts. Rooke stays in the hallway. The girl goes to look at her, but her eyes are darting around too frantically to focus on one single thing. The light isn’t illuminating much, but it’s showing her enough of her surroundings to confirm that they’re unfamiliar.

Everything down here is going to be unfamiliar.

“It’s okay,” she insists, and the girl finally looks her way, for real this time.

“What happened?”

“I found you on the beach,” Dimara explains. “Last night, we saw something fall from the sky. I thought it was a meteorite, but when I went for a walk this morning you were there. And I carried you back here.”

She understands every single word that Dimara says but doesn’t want to believe them. That’s not really a surprise. This is a shock to the system, if anything, and if her powers hadn’t most probably been all but stripped away she’d be a lot more nervous that this girl was about to kill the both of them right now without thinking about it.

She’s looking at Rooke, now, who much to his credit hasn’t gone running for the hills yet. Probably because he’s more terrified about what’s outside.

“That’s Rooke,” she continues. “He’s harmless, don’t worry. My name’s Dimara. I’m— I’m like you.”

That gets her attention, finally. It’s a relief.

“You’re a Nephilim.”

“Yeah.”

Apparently, she doesn’t need to say anything else. She lets go of the coffee table and sags down awkwardly to the ground, legs splayed out in front of her. Dimara watches her reach a trembling hand across her back, clearly feeling for what she already knows is missing. It would be a massive thing to lose.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks after a moment, hoping for some sort of direction. Rooke comes closer, directly behind her back, and she in turn edges closer to the girl, one hand held up warily. “What’s your name?”

“Celia,” she answers after a moment, and then swallows. “I don’t know.”

Not the answer Dimara was going for, if she’s being honest, but she probably won’t get anything better.

This is like asking someone who just woke up from a coma after months all their deepest secrets, asking someone who just lost a limb to go right back to their every day life. Celia’s hand hasn’t left her back, like she doesn’t know where to put it.

But she’s not trying to run, and her breathing has evened back out.

It’s a start.

—

—

—

If Rooke was irritated about having Dimara around, she can’t imagine how he feels with two of them.

Not that Celia really talks to him. For the first little while she hardly moves, not until she’s steady enough. The wounds on her back won’t fully close for another few days, and she edges around carefully, feet hardly touching the ground when she does finally choose to move on her own.

Dimara watches her and grows less hesitant over the hours. The night passes into the next morning and she’s exhausted but can’t manage to take her eyes off her.

She doesn’t really know why.

Celia’s been lurking around the front door for a while now, looking outside. She thinks Rooke’s gone up to bed. Her knees are no longer shaking, and even though she’s got a hand braced against the door Dimara doesn’t think she really needs it there.

She’s also wearing Dimara’s pajamas, which is a little tragic, but she wasn’t about to leave her in the state she found her in.

“Do you wanna go somewhere with me?”

Celia hardly moves, just the slightest tilt of the head to acknowledge her words and continues staring out the window. It appears as if she’s stretching to see the ocean and what’s beyond it, if that’s even possible.

“Where?”

Dimara is not rotating through two outfits for the rest of her days. She needs more clothes. She grabs her keys off the table and knows Celia is watching her when she shoves her feet into her shoes, tracks the movement of the keys as the swing and cling together.

She looks down at her own bare feet.

“C’mon,” she gestures quietly, and Celia moves away from the door. Dimara doesn’t think she’s going to respond, much like Rooke, so she heads off across the porch and down the stairs, the gravel of the driveway crunching under her feet. She’s nearly to the car when she hears Celia close the door after her and sits down in time to watch her step through the rocks and dirt at the edge of the car as if she doesn’t care at all what happens.

Celia sits down gingerly in the passenger seat, carefully lowering her back down, and slams the door shut harder than most people would.

“I’ve never been in a car before.”

It’s something that never would have occurred to Dimara, before now. Angels come down all the time, for one reason or another, but why would they drive around, when they could fly?

Celia doesn’t have that choice anymore.

She’s weird, but no weirder than Rooke. Adjusting to the same thing the two of them are; an unexpected, earth-shattering moment in life that has the potential to be the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, or the best.

She starts the car. After a moment, Celia’s lips quirk up.

It doesn’t seem that bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't usually have time to update or publish things on Sunday, so hooray for that I guess. Hope everyone enjoys it.
> 
> This story also has a [Tumblr](https://thefabledcreatures.tumblr.com/) if anyone likes that.


	3. What Goes Up

Dimara doesn’t force her to talk.

Celia is extremely grateful for it but has no idea how to say it.

At least she’s being consistent, which she thinks Dimara also gets as well. She has no idea what to make of any of this. She doesn’t remember anything, either. She can’t remember when she blacked out, two seconds after she hit the water or several long minutes later, when it felt like it was her entire body burning when it was only one thing.

She doesn’t know why she’s here.

Earth has never really been a terrifying thing to her, though. Some of the ones up there act like it’s the worst possible thing to exist, and she knows that they’d rather die outright than get stripped of everything and sent down here.

Dimara’s not giving her much time to think, which is probably a good thing. If she starts thinking about it, and what she did to deserve this, then she’ll start getting angry, and that won’t end well.

Not that she could really do anything about it. She can feel the complete lack of strength she has now, and she’s exhausted, and her back won’t stop hurting, and she doesn’t reckon it will until it heals. For all she knows this is just how a regular human feels all the time, and if that’s the truth, she feels very bad for them all. This sucks.

All the people she sees walking around, once they get closer to the city, don’t look like they’re in any pain, though. They all look normal. Some happy, some annoyed, some sad and trying to hide it. She watches the trees trickle into near non-existence behind the buildings and apartments and shops and finds herself looking back down the road, trying to see where they really started to end.

“I know,” Dimara says quietly. “The city’s stressful.”

“Are there a lot of supernaturals here?”

“Not in the city, unless they’re really good at blending in. You find most of them in places like the one we came from. Smaller towns and villages. Farmland. A lot of normal humans are shitty and chase them out.”

“Because they’re scared.”

“That, and because they don’t like things different than them. Listen, when we get out of the car, just follow me.”

Well, she wasn’t about to go running off. Living up in the sky doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what happens to the ones that fall, because it’s usually not long after that that they pass on. She’s not immortal anymore. Something could kill her with a single strike.

If she didn’t kill them first. She’s not letting anyone touch her.

Dimara pulls the car into a half-empty lot, and Celia doesn’t waste a second in getting out as soon as she does. She probably should listen, even if she doesn’t want to. At this point it’s for her own safety. Dying is about the only thing above listening on the list on stuff she doesn’t want to do, and Dimara’s clearly trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.

She follows her up the steps of the apartment building, and her back twinges the entire time, pulling at the wounds. Dimara stops her when someone leaves an apartment not far from them, and they stay there until the man leaves the opposite way.

Fallen or not, she’s still probably stronger than him. She knows Dimara is.

Even if this is all relatively new to her, she knows that attacking a stranger just because he looks at her a second too long isn’t going to go over well. She’s wearing pajamas and has no shoes on and probably looks terrible. Of course he would stare.

She still feels much better when Dimara produces a key and opens the door to another apartment and lets her slip inside first.

“You can do whatever you want,” Dimara tells her. “Look around, get something from the kitchen if you want. That’s the front closet, there should be at least one pair of shoes in there that fits you, so feel free to dig through them. I’m just gonna pack some stuff up.”

Dimara leaves her in the entryway and heads down the hall, but she can hear her rustling through things clear as day. She opens the closet first, because it’s a good place to start. She wasn’t aware that human beings needed this many shoes, but that makes it pretty easy to find more than one pair that seems to fit her alright. And with this many, it doesn’t appear that Dimara is going to miss them.

Dimara’s still going through stuff, occasionally swearing, so Celia walks around. It’s rather big for an apartment, but nothing obviously special. A living room, a kitchen off to the side. A small patio that overlooks a downtown section of the city. There must be more down the hall, but Dimara seems very intent on whatever it is that she’s doing, so she takes her shoes and sits down on the couch. Less strain on her back.

This place feels empty, like something’s wrong with it. Even Dimara’s random muttering isn’t doing much on that front. Something’s clearly missing from this place. There’s two spots worn down on the couch, one at either end, on either side of where she’s sat down. There’s an empty mug on the coaster on one end table.

Eventually she picks up the lone picture frame next to it, having spent too long trying to avoid looking at it because she feels like she’s prying.

Except Dimara was the one that picked her up off the beach, right? She didn’t ask to end up here.

Dimara’s obviously one half of the photo, except a few years younger, side by side with an older woman, and something is itching in the back of her head. She takes the frame and her new shoes with her when she heads down the hallway. Dimara is on her hands and knees looking under a bed for something. It looks like she’s torn her entire closet down onto the floor, and only roughly half of it has been so far shoved into one of two duffle bags that she’s pulled out. Celia’s surprised by how quickly and intently she looks up, first at the shoes, and then at what else she’s got in her hand.

“Who is this?” she asks, and Dimara flops back to lean against the bed, pushing her hair back.

“My grandmother. She died last week.”

“I think I saw her. See a lot of people but I think… I think she was there. That she passed on fine.”

Dimara smiles, but there’s something sad behind it. “Thank you for telling me that. That actually makes me feel a bit better.”

Celia offers her the picture and Dimara takes it without a word, wrapping a shirt around it before she crams it in one of the duffel bags along with everything else. She takes the shoes too, all except one pair, and then hands her a small pile of folded clothes.

“I didn’t think you’d wanna live in my pajamas for the rest of your life. Bathroom’s down the hall if you want to change.”

She does have to admit that she got immensely lucky, landing where she did. So many other things could have happened. Someone could have walked up and killed her or left her there until the tide rose back up and dragged her under again. Someone could have taken her and done something horrible.

She hasn’t really had the chance to look, nor has she wanted to, but she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter when she pulls off her shirt in the bathroom and sees the jagged wounds down her back. They’re already smaller than what Dimara said they were when she found her, but they’re still there, a very harsh reminder of what happened to her.

She just can’t figure out what she did and isn’t sure if she wants to know. All too soon the wounds will be gone, but she isn’t sure they’ll fade like they usually do. This will leave a permanent mark on her back, so that every time she looks she’ll remember what happened to her.

She grabs the other shirt and pulls it over her head.

The future may hold dozens of opportunities to look, but she’s through with looking now.

—

—

—

Celia knows something is wrong before they’re even halfway up the driveway.

Dimara can’t sense that anything’s wrong, which is no real surprise, and Celia’s not even sure how she can tell. She’s spent years looking down on every single supernatural creature that exists in the world, and maybe she just has a knack for picking them out from the crowd, for knowing when something that isn’t right is coming.

Celia is not at all shocked when they round the last bend and there is someone standing on the front porch of the house. Dimara nearly hits the breaks in her surprise.

“Do you know who that is?” Celia asks, and Dimara shakes her head, craning forward to peer out the front windshield like that will help at all. Whoever he is, he’s already turned around and is staring at them. He looks slightly frantic.

The door is also wide open.

Dimara stops the car just in front of the porch, and Celia’s about to reach out and grab her when Dimara grabs her instead.

“Don’t get out of the car.”

“ _You_ don’t get out of the car,” she fires back, pulls her arm out of Dimara’s grip, and then gets out of the car. Dimara doesn’t listen, but neither would she, so who is Celia to argue with her? The guy is still standing there staring at them, and Rooke is maybe ten feet into the house, apparently refusing to come any closer. He probably shouldn’t have opened the door in the first place.

Dimara doesn’t even have the car door fully closed when she stops. “You’re the fucker from the beach.”

“You know, I’ve heard a lot of fucking names over the years but never that one,” he replies. “Anyway, can you convince this one to let me in? I may or may not have pissed off what I’m suspecting is a very large pack of werewolves and they’ll probably be up here in like. Two minutes.”

“No?” Dimara refuses.

“I told you,” Rooke says. “I can’t let you in. I don’t own the house!”

“You didn’t say anything about there being werewolves,” Dimara complains, and Rooke sighs.

“There aren’t. Usually.”

“What is going on right now?” the guy asks. “I just want someone to let me in for five minutes.”

“The door’s open,” Dimara points out, and all three of them stare at her for long enough that finally she turns back to look at Celia, eyebrows furrowed. The look she’s giving her somehow must be enough for realization to dawn in her eyes, and when she looks back at the guy her facial expression has changed completely. Now she just looks annoyed.

“Yeah, that would be a headline,” she says slowly. “ _Unsuspecting girl lets creepy vampire man into her house and he kills her in her sleep_. Who would’ve thought, hey?”

“C’mon,” he insists. “That’s an unfair judgement.”

Maybe it is, considering even Celia doesn’t think he’s planning on killing any of them, but it’s still a present thought in the back of her mind as well. She watches his head swivel, looking back down the drive, and a moment later they all hear a very loud and old car coming up the drive. They really are looking for him. Natural born enemies, and all that.

“Oh no,” Rooke says.

Dimara marches right up the front steps and literally grabs the guy’s shirt. She really needs to give her credit for not attempting to fight him back down the steps, because that’s what she was on the fast track to doing. Let the wolves have him, the day of the full moon, see what he ends up looking like.

“If you even touch any of us,” she starts.

“I’m not going to!” he insists wildly.

“Okay, fine. Go in. And don’t touch anything either.”

She doesn’t need to tell him twice. Rooke has crept closer during the entire thing and manages to hold his ground when the guy walks right across the threshold and nearly into him.

“Oh,” Rooke says quietly. “Your eyes _are_ weird.”

“Fuck you too, Danny Phantom.”

“Don’t be mean to him,” Dimara instructs, and then looks back at her. “Just leave the stuff in the car for now. We’ll go back out later for it.”

She wasn’t about to, not when she can already see the car coming up the drive. It looks like there’s more people packed into it than what is considered legal. Dimara slams the door shut.

This guy probably made the mistake of coming down from the city to a place where he can manage to anger everyone in a ten-mile radius. He’s one of the few that can probably blend in, like Dimara said. Besides the whole pale skin and weird eyes thing, he looks almost human. She’s seen the ones, though, who’s eyes have gone so dark and black out of hunger that they look like possessed bodies, all the veins around their eyes stark against their skin. She’s seen them slaughter entire villages of people.

His eyes are almost completely normal, but different enough that they can all tell. Maybe a little dark around the edges, meaning he probably killed someone a few days ago and theoretically should not have to kill any of them.

Theoretically.

That doesn’t stop Rooke from staring after him once he disappears into the kitchen, eyes wide as can be. There’s the very distinct sound of the fridge opening, and Rooke turns around to look at Dimara, waiting for her reaction.

So much for not touching anything.

“You’re going to regret this,” Celia informs her.

“Probably,” she agrees.

At least they're all in the same boat.

—

—

—

Blair, as she soon comes to learn, has absolutely zero desire to leave the house.

Rooke is very alarmed. Dimara is very concerned. Celia is very much not surprised by any of this, not in the slightest.

They don’t have the ability to force him out, which Celia comes to realize very slowly, and then tries not to be angry about. Before she probably could have kicked him back out the front door, and now if she tried he’d probably kill her in two seconds flat.

Not the greatest thought to have, about someone that’s wandering around the house that you’re also in.

For the first little while he spends most of his time peering out the window with Dimara or Rooke watching him. The car full of actual, literal werewolves lurks around the grounds for a solid hour. They can probably smell him, they’re not stupid. They know he’s around here somewhere, even if not in the house directly.

The darker the skies become, though, the more antsy they begin to grow. Eventually they all pack back up into the car and drive off, although Celia doesn’t suspect that they’re going far. Not into town, and certainly not back towards Portland. The night of the full moon they’ll stay in the woods, and the ones closest are also the ones directly in front of them.

Who knows where they came from, but everyone knows they’re not leaving now.

Not until the morning.

“I’m not going back out there now, are you kidding me?” Blair asks. They really should have just assumed this would happen. “The only thing worse than getting torn apart by a human pack is an actual fully changed wolf pack. I’ll pass.”

After that he just spends most of his time wandering around. Rooke hasn’t come out of his room in hours. Blair is touching literally everything he looks at for more than two seconds, and she suspects he’s doing it just to rile Dimara up.

Like she said, nothing they can do now.

So Celia spends most of her time ignoring him, and secretly hoping that if someone stops entertaining him long enough that he will just eventually get up and leave. She heads upstairs, to where they dumped Dimara’s stuff after they finally decided to venture outside and get it. They haven’t done anything with it, so Celia starts sorting through it all, putting stuff away. If Dimara’s letting her steal half her stuff she should probably try to act grateful for it.

She unwraps the picture frame and places it on the bedside table and then starts shoving the shoes into the bottom of the closet, because she has approximately zero idea how she’s supposed to fold the rest of this stuff.

“You didn’t have to do any of that,” Dimara says, and then sits down across from her on the floor with a thud, the bags between them. Celia shrugs, and finds that her back doesn’t hurt quite as much this time when she does.

Besides, it’s giving her something to focus on that isn’t completely negative. It’s a welcome distraction, from thinking about what happened and what she’s supposed to do now. It helps take her away from the fact that there’s a literal vampire a floor down and Rooke’s locked himself in his room to avoid confronting that particular reality. Something Celia wishes she almost had the privilege to do.

The bag she’s sorting through is nearing empty, though, and Dimara’s working on the other one, so maybe once she’s done she will try and get some sleep.

Not that it solved much last night.

The bag is still quite heavy, though, and she reaches into the far corner and pulls out a wooden box about the length of her forearm. Dimara doesn’t even spare a glance up when she does it, so Celia sets it down and cracks it open. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting to see, but certainly not knives, and even in the lack of light they’re still silver-white, shimmering faintly when she chooses one and holds it up.

“Angel blades,” she says quietly, and Dimara finishes hanging up a sweater before she turns around.

“Yeah,” she explains. “They were my grandma’s. More effective for killing things that don’t want to be killed than anything else. Figured this close to the woods we might need them.”

Something about the sight of them makes Celia feel better. She may not be an expert in weaponry but even she knows these types of weapons respond better to their hands than they would with any normal human hunter.

They explain the confidence Dimara has in herself, too, half a supernatural creature looking a full one in the eye with no hesitance.

“If you want,” she says slowly. “Once your back’s all good, I can teach you how to actually use them. Believe me, being a naturally talented angel and all that, it won’t take long. If that would make you feel better.”

Half human or not, attempted mind reader seems to be a high thing on Dimara’s priority list. It’s honestly not as weird as Celia thought it would be.

Dimara looks up from picking several more things off the floor and makes a face. Celia doesn’t have a word for what that face is.

“You know those things can’t kill me, right?” Blair asks from the doorway. Celia may have said that these things made her feel better, but not necessarily with him. He’s got a point. These aren’t going to do anything to him.

Dimara doesn’t seem deterred when she grabs the still mostly full bag off the floor and upends it, scattering clothes and other little things all over the place. Something in the midst of it hits the ground with a rather loud _thunk_ , and Dimara digs through the pile of clothes until she comes up with a leather sheath three times the length of any of the knives, and in one smooth flourish she yanks a sword out of it with hardly a sound.

“Would that work?” Dimara asks, and Celia can’t help the smirk that forms on her face. To his credit Blair really doesn’t look concerned, per say. Dimara would still have to catch him, and that probably wouldn’t be an easy feat, but that sword would be enough to take his head off if she did.

One of the only sure-fire ways to kill one.

Blair nods. “Sure would. I’ll be going back downstairs now.”

Dimara snorts as soon as he’s out of sight and then puts the sword away. If Celia didn’t know better, she’d have assumed Dimara brought that thing here with the sole purpose of using it to freak someone out down the line. Blair just so happened to be the first unfortunate victim of that, but it’s his fault for showing up and demanding entry in the first place.

“Keep that one,” Dimara says, gesturing to the knife in her hand. “Got lots more back at the apartment. Might just have to go get them.”

She nods in agreement and lets the knife rest across both palms. It’s light as can be, and hardly feels like it’s there at all. It must be weird for Dimara, to have grown up around a hunter and nearly be one herself and to be dealing with all of this now. It’s probably not even close to what she signed up for.

“Believe me, you’re already stronger and faster than normal people. It may not feel like it right now, but c’mon. Normal people couldn’t drag themselves out of the ocean after falling straight out of the sky.”

“I didn’t drag myself out.”

“What?”

“I don’t— I don’t really remember all of it, but I was awake when I hit the water. It was kind of hard not to be. But I _do r_ emembering sinking and just accepting that I was about to drown because I couldn’t make myself move. And then I woke up here.”

Dimara’s staring at her a bit skeptically. “You know there’s a lot of fucked up things in the ocean, right?”

“Yeah.”

Celia remembers how far away the shoreline was, and how the water was almost completely still in the lack of wind. There’s no way the current would have brought her all the way to shore before she drowned. Dimara would have found a lifeless body on the beach if that was the case, not her alive.

She didn’t pull herself out, but something else did.

Dimara’s still looking at her, but a howl from outside interrupts the otherwise quiet inside the room. The moon is very high in the sky, perfectly full. The woods are going to come alive tonight, and it seems that they already are. Dimara pulls the curtain aside and peers out the window.

“Why do I have a feeling this isn’t going to end well?” she sighs, and Celia shrugs.

It hurts even less that time.

—

—

—

No one sleeps the entire night.

Dimara eventually forces Rooke out of his room, and he proceeds to spend the hours between midnight and six in the morning perched on one end of the couch like a gargoyle, staring out the sliver of window that isn’t covered by the curtain. Occasionally Blair will come over and nearly knock him off the couch, if he’s not attempting to eat everything Dimara just spent so much time putting in the cupboards.

Dimara herself spends most of her time getting irrationally angry because the toaster oven won’t turn on, when she’s not getting irrationally angry at Blair eating everything.

She just spends most of her time sitting on the couch and watching Rooke flail away every time Blair gets anywhere close to him. It’s kind of funny.

It’s nearing dawn when Dimara eventually falls asleep at the kitchen table, and the howling finally stops not long after that. Only when it finally goes quiet does Rooke go trudging back up the stairs, shoulders hunched, looking like he hasn’t slept in a year.

She’s not sure where Blair is. Last she heard he was combing through whatever’s in the basement, but she’s not in the mood to check.

She grabs Dimara’s jacket off the back of the door and slips the blade inside one of the pockets, just in case, before she steps outside. Chances are no one will wake up and notice she’s gone except for Blair, who probably won’t really care.

The sun is already blazing hot, which seems to make a trip down to the ocean justified. The coat almost becomes a burden as she walks, but she feels better having some sort of weapon, even if she’s not sure of what to do with it or if anything’s still out here. Every twitch in the undergrowth sends her turning around, making sure that nothing comes running out at her. There would be no reason for any of the wolves to still be, well, wolves, but that doesn’t mean that none of them are. It doesn’t help that her legs still aren’t used to walking just yet, and instead of flight she finds herself tripping over every damn tree root and stone she comes across. She never used to look out for things like that. Why would she?

Clearly, stranger things have happened, than a wolf sprinting out of the woods to kill someone who’s just asking to trip over something. She’s not about to experience mortality two days after getting sent down here for good.

The beach still feels much safer than the forest does. Less to look at, and less to hide behind if you ignore the water, and the thousands of things in it. Including one thing that she’s certain must have grabbed her and pulled her to shore, or else she’d be dead. From what she knows, most of the things in the ocean are bad. Terrible, in fact. The sirens and the leviathans and everything else that would think nothing of killing whoever tried to take them out of the water. That’s why so few people do, in the long run. It’s not worth the risk, when they can’t set foot on dry land.

Celia walks up and along the entire dock and kicks her sandals off at the end so that she can sit down, legs swinging over the water.

Something could reach up and grab her. Nothing particularly big – all of those things are out deeper. But the possibility still exists, and she’s all too aware of it. She doesn’t think Dimara would be pleased to find her torn apart body floating in the water after she carried her all the way back to the house in first place.

She isn’t sure how long she sits there, but the sun gradually starts to burn against her bare shoulders and she drapes the jacket over them, even though it’s going to make the heat worse in the long run. She doesn’t like the feeling of heat on her back, not when she just had a part of her body burned off.

It’s one of the only things she really does remember, about falling. The fire was the worst part.

“If anything wants to pop up and talk to me, I’m all for it,” she offers eventually. A bird leaves its nearby perch when she opens her mouth and flies off. Suddenly, she’s envious of a bird.

She also feels very stupid, for talking to the ocean like it’s going to answer any time soon.

She puts her head in both hands and stares down. The water’s not all the way clear, and quite cold from what little she does remember. Really, anything could be down there. There’s no way of telling. The humans probably don’t even know the extent of it.

Staring out at the horizon and the water below it isn’t helping her figure out anything either, not the way she had hoped. Even if she hadn’t discovered the reason why she was still alive she was hoping she could at least put something together. Something to help her sleep at night, in a mortal body in a bed in a house that was completely unfamiliar to her, with no one she really knew.

“This is awful,” she mutters, and something brushes against the bottom of her foot.

She jerks her legs back up so fast she nearly rolls over and goes off the side of the dock anyway. Her feet had been maybe a half a foot above the water – too far for any sort of wave to have hit her. That’s about the most concerning thought she’s ever had in her life.

She edges closer, this time on her hands and knees, and peers over. There’s absolutely nothing there. If someone comes walking down the beach at this very moment, they’re going to think she’s insane.

Not very far off, honestly.

She can’t stare forever, but she wants to. Someone will wake up and realize she’s gone eventually. She wouldn’t be surprised if Blair was back at the treeline right now laughing at her, just to get his daily source of amusement. Anything seems more plausible than this, than something really touching her foot, than something saving her life at all.

She goes to stand up, sighing, and her foot slips on a wet patch of the dock, and then, predictably, she falls right in.

The first thing she registers is that the water is cold, colder than she remembered. It’s also a lot clearer, down here, but even then, she can’t see much. Some seaweed, and the sand and rocks all along the bottom, and some dirt stinging her eyes. That’s about it.

And something just below her, something she really can’t make out.

Not until her head is about to crest the water, and it yanks her back down.

That’s when she starts panicking.

She gets a very large mouthful of water for her troubles, because she had been about two seconds from getting a proper breath in when it pulled her down, and it’s instinctive. She feels the fear kick in, when the water goes down her throat, and there are hands locked around both her ankles and holding on tight, refusing to let her go back to the surface.

There’s a flash of a tail, what she saw before, and she didn’t think mermaids were particularly vicious creatures, but _wow_ is she about to take that one back. It’s definitely a guy, and he wraps his arms around both her legs when she starts kicking down, trying to free herself, and then she’s basically stuck there, wriggling and drowning to death like an idiot because he won’t let her go.

He looks very unruffled by all of this.

She keeps thrashing, but it’s not doing anything. It feels like she’s moving in slow motion, has since the second she hit the water.

It takes her a ridiculously long amount of time to realize she’s not drowning.

Her legs go abruptly still when she realizes there’s no burn in her lungs, no ache like her chest is about to burst open from all the water she’s inhaled. When she tries to breathe out there’s a massive cloud of bubbles that float up and break the surface, and she traces them with her eyes before she looks down at him. He’s got a ridiculously happy smile on his face, and now that her anxiety isn’t threatening to kill her she has the foolish notion to appreciate the face she’s looking at, even if he still is holding her captive underwater.

She shouldn’t be able to breathe right now. He’s got scales and a tail and g _ills_ and that make sense, ridiculously, but her breathing doesn’t.

He lets go of her with one arm, still anchoring her down, and then reaches around, his hand tapping against his own back and then he looks up at her, questioning.

It takes her a second, to feel the burn of the salt water against the wounds on her back.

She stares. He smiles again, and then lets her go.

She shoots up to the surface like a damn buoy, and flails around for a moment as her head breaks the surface, gasping before her hand collides with the ladder attached to the dock. She clings to it, still heaving for breath.

“What the fuck,” she gets out, and then pops her head back underwater.

He’s gone. Nowhere in sight. She should’ve figured he would be fast.

“I’m not crazy,” she continues. “Wow, I’m not crazy.”

She may not be, but boy, does it feel like she is.

—

—

—

Celia spends nearly an hour with all four limbs looped very awkwardly around the ladder, waiting for him to come back.

She only climbs out because she starts to get cold sitting there, and eventually people start to trickle down the beach. She knows what Dimara told her, what happens to people like her, so she climbs out, grabs the jacket and stuffs her feet into the sandals, and takes back off.

She doesn’t trip once the whole way back.

Her expectation is that at least someone will be waiting for her to get back, because they were all too tired or uncaring to actually come and look. What she doesn’t expect is for the door to already be open with Dimara leaning on the edge of it, looking just as tired as she did a few hours ago. There’s a very small, very excited person on the front porch, talking to Dimara and then pointing wildly over the field, back towards the woods.

Maybe excited isn’t the right word. She actually kind of looks concerned.

Celia finds herself slowing the closer she gets to the porch, and while Dimara notices her the other girl doesn’t. She can see Blair too, lurking just beyond Dimara.

“Hey,” Dimara says, and then actually looks her over. “Why are you wet?”

She pauses. The girl whirls around and looks at her.

“No reason?” she tries.

She’s sure someone’s going to question that more, but the girl basically launches herself down the front steps and grabs Celia’s arm before anyone really can. She’s still gesturing back to the woods with her other hand.

“Will you actually listen to me?” she asks, slightly breathless. “Please, there’s someone in the woods, and if I take him back to my family they’ll probably put him out of his misery because we don’t usually like outsiders but I’m afraid if I just leave him there that something will kill him anyway.”

She’s not totally sure, but she thinks Blair looks a little bit amused. The girl’s got the same aura that a lot of the angels have, something off about them that marks them as inhuman, and judging by the fact that Celia would probably lose her more than two feet into the trees she’d blend in so well, she’s probably from the colony that lives so far in no one’s ever found them.

She could always see everything before, but even she wouldn’t dare land in the middle of that.

“Okay?” she says eventually, unsure of what she’s actually supposed to do here. Is this girl asking her to do something?

Well, now she just looks exasperated. A very concerning thing, for someone who looks like they could be bowled over by a stiff breeze. She wouldn’t obviously, nature powers and all that, but it still looks like a possibility.

“I think he got attacked by one of the wolves last night,” she continues. “They’re not usually in these parts, people go for walks all the time because they’re typically pretty far off.”

“Ew,” Blair says, rather dramatically.

“How bad is he hurt?” Dimara asks.

“Bad, okay, but I got him to wake up when I went up to him, so I think he might be okay if someone would help him.”

“ _Might be okay_ as in he just got mauled by a wolf and is now changing into one, because if he’s hurt as bad as you say he’d be dead by now.” I didn’t think Blair could look any more unimpressed at the sight and mention of wolves after yesterday, and yet here we are.

She’s still holding onto her arm. She gently pulls free of her grasp.

She can already see it in Dimara’s eyes. It’s a good thing she’s already partially dry, or there’s absolutely no way she’d agree to go trekking into the woods right now following a very anxious little fairy to someone who’s probably half dead.

Dimara looks back into the house, probably up the stairs, and then grabs Blair and shuts the door after she drags him onto the front porch.

“You’re coming with us.”

“No, I’m not,” he insists, and then shields his eyes from the sun, like it’s the worst thing to possibly exist. She pulls him down the stairs. “I just spent yesterday running a _way_ from a pack of wolves, what makes you think I want to look after another one?”

“I wasn’t asking. And you don’t know that he’s turning into one.”

“Yeah, I do,” Blair mutters, but doesn’t yank his arm out of her grip until they’re clear in the meadow surrounding the house. If he was going to outright refuse, he’d have done it way before then.

She can’t help but wonder if there’s something happening in this area. Wolves that aren’t usually here, things coming up from the ocean to pull people out when they hardly ever show their faces, fairies breaking free from the woods to ask for outside help.

Angels falling from the sky.

It certainly seems like something is.


	4. Out Of The Dark

Vance remembers getting dragged off the road, and not much after.

He remembers hearing the howling start up, too close, and he still thought he had the time to turn around and go back.

He doesn’t even see it. As dark as it was, as human as he may be, there’s no indication to what’s about to come out of the brush. No movement, no glowing eyes, nothing to indicate that he’s about to be sent flying over the side of the road and into the ditch with something on top of him.

When there are teeth in his shoulder, he stops thinking about running away.

He stops thinking about running away, because he knows he’s not going to be able to.

He doesn’t know when he blacks out. Not soon enough. His blood is everywhere, soaked into his clothes and into the fur of the wolf that is on the fast track to killing him. There’s claws in his throat, blood bubbling up from the holes that it leaves behind, and they’re pushing all along his torso too, and into his hips and his legs and it’s just _everywhere._

He remembers hearing a car, and seeing the headlights pass over them, and he couldn’t do anything about it. He next opens his eyes and he’s being literally dragged through the undergrowth, teeth still locked bone deep into his shoulder. On top of being mauled he’s now going to be eaten, he thinks quite hysterically, which is the last thing he manages to think before it jerks him up and over something, a bump in the ground, or a log, and he blacks out again.

He wakes up, and he can feel the sun.

Well, not really. His face is mostly mashed into the ground, his own blood pooled sticky and not all the way dry underneath him. He doesn’t know why he’s awake, or why he’s alive, or why is brain is choosing now to keep him conscious, when it feels like every single inch of his body is on fire or still bleeding all over the forest floor.

“Oh, no,” someone manages. “You’re alive. I didn’t plan this far ahead.”

Vance wishes he could raise enough energy to figure out what that’s supposed to mean. He tries to lift his head up and can’t even move it an inch. When he tries to get a hand under himself to push upwards, he realizes his fingers are so mangled they don’t even really look like fingers.

“No, don’t move, please don’t move. You’re okay.”

He’s not okay. He can feel it, when whoever this is puts a hand very gently against his elbow, one of the only places that doesn’t feel ripped open on him besides his face. There’s blood in his eyes. He can’t even see who it is.

He isn’t sure if he wants to.

“Alright, just stay here?” she tries, like he’s going to be getting up and walking off any time soon. More like never again. “I’m gonna go get someone, don’t worry.”

He’s worrying. The second he feels her get up he tries to move out to her, even if he can hardly reach out, and she must crouch back down next to him for a moment because suddenly she feels very close again.

“I won’t be gone long,” she insists. “If— if anyone that’s not me finds you, just tell them Kelsea said not to hurt you. Alright?”

She gets up and runs off. He feels it. He has no idea how he’s supposed to tell anyone that, when he can’t even get a single word out. He doesn’t even know what _Kelsea_ looks like, so if someone else finds him and doesn’t say anything, he’s done for. He won’t know who’s who.

His focus is torn, between devoting all his attention to staying conscious and everything around him. Not being able to see snaps everything else into perspective, but this is so much more. He can hear every miniscule sound, smell what must be a crop of flowers somewhere behind him, and he can smell the blood, too, sharp and metallic. The scent of the wolves is all around him, and somehow, he knows their pawprints are in the dirt, even if he can’t see them.

He also swears he can hear voices, faint and almost musical, and the sound of wings, very far off in the distance.

Trying to move again proves to be a mistake. Pain lances up his side and all throughout his back. It almost feels like he’s broken something, if he really knew what that felt like.

The hand he’s lying on is mostly intact, and he wiggles it free to try and scrub at his face. He can feel that his arm is ripped open too, the soft skin on the insides ripped to shreds and running blood everywhere. It helps clear some of the crusted over blood from his eyes, though, even if half of it’s replaced by dirt. He can sort of see, now. He already knew he was on his side, and the trees are all tilted at an awkward angle. He’s not sure if that’s him, or the ground underneath him.

Another voice snaps into focus, this one different and not as lilting. He can hear footsteps rumbling through the ground, the beginnings of an earthquake that thunders louder and louder, until he can hear what he’s sure are Kelsea’s footsteps rapidly approaching, before she skids to a halt and nearly sprays dirt all over him.

It’s the other people with her that are concerning, to him. His vision is still blurry as can be. Kelsea looks like the most non-threatening person he’s ever met, but the other three not so much.

“Fucking hell,” the guy says flatly. That’s about what Vance was expecting to come out of his mouth.

“You know, when you said he was bad, I was expecting like. A few injuries. A little blood. Not someone who just got put through a meat grinder.”

Suddenly, Vance is very glad that he cannot move his head to see. At all.

The one who said it, the blonde one, is growing concerned when before he had felt nothing from her other than the quiet calm before the storm. He can’t decide which one of the other two looks more unimpressed, although he’s leaning towards the guy. It’s hard, when he can’t really make out their faces.

Kelsea kneels right next to him again, hands gentle against his skin. No one else moves.

“Hey, you stayed awake,” she says, and smiles. If only she knew how much focus he had to control, to do it. She wouldn’t be so encouraging then. He’s very tempted to close his eyes again when she turns back to the others, but something makes him stay awake.

“Why are you looking at me like you’re assuming I’m going to take a not yet fully changed werewolf and let him live in my house?”

He feels sick, at that, even though something in him already knew. It’s how he can feel his own heartbeat ten times stronger than usual but all of theirs as well, irregular and beating out of turn.

“You already took a vampire and let him in.”

“I did not _take him._ ”

“I think you did,” the other girl says, finally. “And I think you’re taking this one, too. You know you are.”

He doesn’t have a say in this conversation. Whether or not that’s because of the blood loss or because he’s growing mighty concerned about the state of his vocal chords, he’s not entirely sure.

“I mean, it’s put him in the house or have him run around and kill everyone he sees a month from now,” the guy says, and they all give him varying looks. “He’s changing, believe me. I can smell it. Like I said, those injuries would have killed him by now if he wasn’t. The change is trying to heal him.”

Vance is looking at something he can’t figure out right now. Or at least he’s trying to. He can feel his vision starting to fade at the edges, and shifts. Kelsea turns back to him, her hands tightening for just a moment. With her he has no idea what he’s looking at either, he just knows it’s some form of safety and right now that’s good enough.

“You’re seriously advocating putting a werewolf in the house?”

“I’m not advocating for shit,” he says. “I’m just saying, you think I don’t know how terribly it goes, when you’re wandering around on your own after it first happens?”

“Celia?”

“No comment.”

The lead one sighs and wipes both her hands across her face. She looks very tired, and he’s going to make it worse. He doesn’t have the energy or the forethought to feel bad about it.

“Blair, will you carry him back?”

“Of course, you’re making me do it, right,” the guy sighs; that’s obviously Blair. Vance manages to feel at least slightly alarmed when he leans down to pick him up, the thought to brace himself for the agony only that, a thought. It does nothing, when he slides one hand under his knees and the other around his back and lifts him up off the ground in one fluid motion.

He doesn’t know what hurts the worst, whatever’s happening with his back, something burning along his hip, or what he’s sure is the tear right through his throat before Blair manages to keep his head up for good.

“Jesus, be careful,” someone snaps. He’s not so sure who, when all he’s focused on is not throwing up.

He hasn’t thought at all, about who these people might be, or where they’re taking him now. He isn’t sure where Kelsea came from either, or why someone her size is wandering around in the woods alone right now. Blair smells _wrong_ , and not like he put too much cologne on this morning, but in a way that Vance can’t place.

“Might as well get used to it, kid,” Blair huffs, as they start walking. Kelsea’s hand leaves his elbow and slips into his less mangled hand. “Gonna get a hell of a lot worse these next days before it gets better.”

It can’t get worse. It can’t get any worse than now, when he starts thinking about his parents are going to check his room tomorrow morning and find him gone, and how his roommate back at college is going to wonder where the hell he went when he doesn’t show up come September, and he was supposed to meet his friends for breakfast, for god’s sake, and he isn’t dead but it feels like he is.

It gets worse.

—

—

—

If Vance remembers little about the actual event, his memory is in outright pieces afterwards.

The air had changed. Outside to inside. The walls were covered in wood paneling, and his first ridiculous thought was why no one had decided to call a renovation show by now.

“Oh, God, what is that?”

A new voice, then. He had closed his eyes and wasn’t about to re-open them.

“I feel like you say that a lot.”

“Baby werewolf,” Blair explains, and Vance feels like throwing up again. “Move it.”

Someone shifts to the side. The stairs were longer than he thought they would be, when he wasn’t the one walking them. He was laid down on something that felt like a bed, only it hadn’t been used in several hundred years.

Kelsea never let go of his hand, which was kind of nice. Not that it was helping any in the long run. She goes to pull away and he wants to stop her but can’t. She does pause, and even though he isn’t looking anymore he knows she’s still in the room.

“I’m not going anywhere far.”

He can’t ask. He can’t ask her what she is or how she knew he was there or why she bothered saving him in the first place. He can only hope he gets the answers.

More, tromping footsteps. “How old is that bottle? And why are you pouring out enough cough syrup to take out a small elephant?”

Vance knows exactly why that’s happening, because he’s never wanted to be out so badly in his life. He’s in so much pain, and for all Blair’s talk of healing it doesn’t feel like it’s getting better. It just keeps hurting, and he can’t imagine what the next few days will be like, if the first starts off like this.

The bed dips under the weight of whichever of the girls sits down. He’s assuming the one that’s been talking the most.

“You are going to hate me for this,” she informs him, and then cradles his jaw in both hands, forcing his head up and tipped back. There’s no way this ends well, his throat’s literally _not intact_ , but someone forces the syrup into his mouth regardless, and two seconds later he’s choking on it, unable to breathe, but she doesn’t let go of him. Someone grabs his legs, fingers closing on the ribbons that is his leftover skin as he tries to get away. This is probably why Kelsea left. No way she wanted to see this.

No one would.

He feels it hit him almost instantly. It was a lot, the taste still heavy on his tongue, and is chest is still heaving but she hasn’t let go of him. Eventually he lets his head loll weakly into her hands, because he can’t manage to keep it up anymore.

“We got you,” she says quietly. “Don’t worry.”

Everything’s starting to swim away. Her voice and the pressure against his legs and jaw, the presence of whoever’s else in the room.

It’s all going away.

He’s grateful for it.

After that, time becomes something that’s almost fake.

It’s dark again. He still can’t open his eyes, but breathing’s a little easier. Someone’s holding his hand, a barely there pressure. He can’t tell if it’s Kelsea or someone else.

Light again, until someone cuts the light off from the inside. Speaking of insides, it’s that that’s burning now. He can feel everywhere the claws and teeth sunk in, but they don’t hurt the same way anymore.

Someone’s got a hand on his forehead, now. He’s burning. He’s on fire from the inside out.

Someone’s talking, very quietly. It could be light or dark or he could be dead, for all he knew.

It’s his other hand, this time. His fingers are whole again.

That doesn’t make any sense.

He wakes up shaking, right near the end, violently cold and still on fire at the same time. That’s the only time he manages to open his eyes. Someone’s asleep in the armchair in the corner of the room. Girl, dark hair. Can’t remember her name. He’s sure someone said it at some point.

He moves, and his body doesn’t immediately break out into agony, and when he opens his mouth a very faint wheeze comes out. Someone flattens a hand to his shoulder to still him, and as soon as he settles back into the bed his eyes close again, like he’s lost control of the ability to decide when he falls asleep and when he doesn’t.

It’s dark again, and someone’s turned a lamp on. He can see the pinpoint of light behind his closed eyelids. His hand is in someone else’s, a thumb stroking over his knuckles every few seconds. Small hand, very light presence on the bed next to him, hardly leaving a dent.

“Kelsea?” he rasps, his voice cracking and breaking. He feels her turn, and then she squeezes his hand. Vance almost manages to squeeze back.

“Hey,” she breathes. Her other hand settles cool over the center of his forehead. He doesn’t feel quite as hot anymore. “Go back to sleep. It’s over.”

So he does.

—

—

—

He wakes up, and he’s alone.

Vance lays there for a very long time, listening for the sounds of someone else breathing, the presence of another body in the room, but that time never comes.

His eyes are very heavy, sticky with sleep, but at least he can open them, and see properly once he does. The room is much like what he remembers the rest of the house to be like. Lots of wood, mostly, but other than that not much else. The house is very quiet, a far cry from what he remembers of the woods, lying there on the ground.

He isn’t sure if he’s breathing too loud because of panic, or if that’s just how it’s going to sound now.

Oddly enough, he can already feel himself getting used to it.

It takes him what feels like forever, to swing his legs over the side of the bed and get to his feet. He has to hold onto the wall for a moment to keep himself upright; his legs have turned to complete jello, in however many days it’s been. There’s no way to tell. Now that he has a good look at his arm, he feels like he remembers that skin being not so intact, not all that long ago. There’s a little bit of scarring, he notices, but not nearly enough for what he was so sure what happened.

That really doesn’t help his mindset at all.

There’s no one out in the hallway, either, and he can’t figure out how to concentrate hard enough to tell if someone’s hiding away in another room. He thinks he can hear something down the stairs. The entire house is unfamiliar, no place he’s ever been or seen before in his life.

Looking down the stairs worries him. They look very steep, steeper than they probably really are.

He makes it about halfway down. Halfway is a lot further than he thought he would get.

Even clutching onto the bannister his legs still go all wobbly, and he pretty much accepts his fate. Not a wolf this time, but his knees hitting the edge of the stairs and then him probably rolling the rest of the way. That’s one way to get down.

He’s not entirely sure where the person who grabs him comes from – up or down. He’s too busy trying to figure out where his head is going to hit, but someone grabs him in time to stop it from happening.

“I’m good,” he manages, not yet even still. It’s a guy, that’s for sure, but Vance doesn’t think it’s the one that carried him back here. That means there’s another person he has to worry about, not including Kelsea, the two other girls, and him.

He doesn’t think he can keep track of five people right now.

“Dimara!” he calls. “Are you sure about that?”

Vance is pretty sure that if he lets go of him right now he’ll fall anyway, which seems kind of counterproductive. He’s being held pretty awkwardly, and the guy’s arms are freezing. It’s that or he’s running hotter than usual, which also feels like an option. He’s not sure at the moment which one’s weirder.

He can’t see whoever it is, but he can see a weird angle of the door, so he sees who must be Dimara come through the front screen. She must’ve been sitting on the porch with the other one – Celia? He’s about seventy-five percent sure on that one. She doesn’t look too concerned about getting up and helping.

“I thought Blair was supposed to be watching him.”

“I think he’s asleep.”

“Bullshit, he’s a _sleep_ ,” Dimara fires back. “He hasn’t slept since he showed up.”

The second Dimara’s got a hold of him the other guy disappears and heads right back down the stairs like nothing’s ever happened. Vance never even got a good look at him, he disappears so fast. Back into the kitchen, he presumes. There’s no way of telling. Dimara basically walks him the rest of the way down the stairs and into the living room and then drops him on the couch, which he has to admit, is a lot better than walking around.

He must have been out for longer than he thought.

He has no idea what he’s supposed to do, sitting there with Dimara watching him. It doesn’t take very long to Celia come in after her, and she sits down on the edge of the opposite couch and watches him too.

“What?” he asks. He has no idea how he has a voice at all, after what he remembers.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“How much do you actually remember?”

Honestly, he’s been trying not to think about it, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to remember any of it, not a single second, but he can. All that’s really coming to mind is the pain and the blood and whoever kept saying the word werewolf, the only word it feels like he’s allowed to hear.

He opens his eyes, and that guy is back in the kitchen doorway, watching him too. It feels like he’s under a magnifying glass.

“Ignore Rooke, he’s harmless,” Dimara says. “And stop thinking about it, if it’s hurting your head that bad. I just – I want you to realize, what’s happening. What’s _going_ to happen. You’re safe here, but I just want you to know—”

“I got it,” I manage. “Believe me, I got it.”

He may understand, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s happening. This is the kind of thing you read about in the newspaper, or something that’s on the morning news. Someone getting attacked alongside the road or getting ripped out of their car. But it doesn’t happen to everyone, and not to him, just because he was stupid enough to go out alone one night.

He doesn’t even have his phone, or his wallet. Probably both lost somewhere in the woods. No one knows where he is. He doesn’t even know that. He doesn’t know who any of these people are, or what the hell he’s supposed to do now.

“He’s freaking out,” Blair says, from the top of the stairs, and he nearly jumps a mile. Dimara narrows her eyes at him.

“No shit, I don’t need super senses to figure that one out.”

She sits down on the table in front of him, all while he tries very hard not to completely lose it. Super senses, right, just figures he winds up in a house with other creatures he’s not all too aware of.

“Are you human?” he forces out, and Dimara tilts her head, almost in thought.

“Not fully,” Celia answers for her.

“No one who’s walked in this house is,” Rooke says, at nearly the same time, and then heads up the stairs and right past Blair, who almost looks tempted to push him as he goes by. Maybe Blair was right; it feels like he’s ridiculously close to a panic attack, or maybe that’s just how fast everything’s going to feel from now on.

“How long has it been?”

“Five days.”

Five days, since he went missing. It’s a miracle his parents haven’t managed to track him down out of sheer hysteria yet.

“Do you have a phone?” he asks. Dimara pulls her phone out of her pocket instantly but withholds it from him.

“Listen. If you want to go back wherever you came from, I can’t stop you, but if you do, something bad is going to happen. Even if you pretend like nothing happened, the next full moon, you’re going to change. And even if you somehow _don’t_ hurt anyone you’re close to, you go running loose in the middle of town and someone’s going to put you down.”

He kind of wishes the wolf had just outright killed him. He doesn’t know what’s worse, surviving this just to wind up dead anyway because he doesn’t know how to control it, or trying to go back and hurting someone he cares about. Killing them, probably. Everyone’s heard the horror stories, about what happens the first time. Now he’s one of those same stories, just waiting for the day when he’s finally going to split apart from the inside out and do something terrible to someone he knows.

He knows he can’t go back. He can’t. But it’s terrifying.

“I just,” he manages, trying to calm his own breathing. “I need to call someone. Just let them know that I’m alright. That’s it.”

Dimara drops the phone in his open palm and then gets up from the table, apparently unwilling to fight him on the issue. He watches her head up the stairs to talk to Blair, but Celia hasn’t moved from the other couch and he thinks of Rooke saying that no one else that’s walked into this house has been human, and for the life of him can’t imagine what she could possibly be.

It takes him a full minute to work up the courage to dial Aubrey’s number and then put the phone up to his ear. He can’t call his parents, Emmett only answers the phone when he’s in the mood, and Pax won’t even be awake right now.

She’s the best bet, in more ways than one.

He still almost expects to go to voicemail, after so many rings go by unanswered. Why would she answer a call from a number she doesn’t know?

“Hello?”

He doesn’t stop breathing, but it feels kind of close.

“Hello?” she repeats, and he lowers his head to rest on his knees. His vocal cords are intact again, but speaking is still not something he’s okay with. Not in a situation like this.

“Aubrey,” he says eventually, fearful that she’s about to hang up. He’s not prepared for the outburst.

“Vance? Oh my god, are you okay, where are you? Jesus, do you know how many days it’s been, we thought you had been like, kidnapped, or murdered or something and I’ve been freaking out and your parents are going to freak too—”

“You can’t tell them,” he says in rush. “Aubrey, listen to me.”

“Are you okay?” she asks again. “Vance, I’m serious, where are you?”

“Something happened,” he gets out. “I don’t – I don’t know what I’m supposed to even be saying, but I’m okay. I think, anyway. And I’m safe, that’s all you need to know.

“Bullshit, that’s all I need to know.”

“It’s not safe for you if I come back. It won’t be safe for any of you.”

He’s not sure what it is about that sentence, that makes her finally shut up. Maybe it’s the fact that he told her he was going out, five days ago, and no one had thought anything of it. Maybe he says that and she finally thinks about what could have happened, everything added up in her head.

“Vance, are you—”

“You can’t tell anyone,” he repeats. “Not my parents, not Emmett, not even Pax. I’m serious.”

Aubrey has never been at a loss for words in her entire life. There’s a first for everything.

“I won’t,” she whispers. “I swear I won’t.”

Blair starts looking at him funny, when he comes down the stairs, and Vance isn’t sure why, but he feels like he’s supposed to do it back. Celia’s looking between them with quite the amused smirk on her face. Dimara sighs.

“I gotta go, alright?” he says quietly. “Just trust me.”

“I do,” she insists. “But—”

He hangs up.

“Cutting someone off mid-sentence?” Blair asks. “Ice cold.”

Vance isn’t sure what he’s supposed to think, once he realizes Blair was clued into the conversation the entire time. He shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all.

Dimara sighs again.

—

—

—

It doesn’t take him very long to realize that he does appear, in fact, to be quite safe.

The house seems very isolated. Up in the woods, far enough from the main road that no strangers will think to turn off it and come exploring. He can’t help but look at the woods and think that he sees things, flitting in-between the branches and disappearing into the undergrowth before he can get a good look at whatever it was.

No one offers any explanation for that, either. Rooke sometimes looks with him, but never says anything. Celia looks like she’s seen it all and doesn’t want to bother. Blair looks like he’d rather give the sun the middle finger than wonder what’s outside.

Dimara spends most of her time trying to herd them all away from him, for the most part, but it never works. The second she turns her back someone’s on him again, trying and failing to be discreet about it. It feels like he ought to be in a cage at the carnival that rolls in around now every single year.

Vance doesn’t even know what day it is. That’s probably a good thing.

Dimara disappears for three hours with Celia, the day after, and comes back with stuff for him. Some clothes that aren’t torn to shreds, about half of which actually fit him, and a phone that Celia nearly breaks she pitches it so hard at him. To which Dimara had irritably sighed about how she had just paid for it and didn’t appreciate it getting broken so soon.

He’s not so sure what to do with the phone. Texting Aubrey seems like a bad idea, and everyone else is even more of a no-go. There’s no wifi signal the first time he turns it on, and he’s not sure when Dimara manages to get that up and running, but it appears eventually. The house slowly comes to life the more hours he spends in it. The television has more than three odd stations, once they spend an hour fiddling with a cable box that Dimara brought back. Rooke watches most of this in silence that seems a little mystified, like he isn’t sure how all of this even happened.

Vance really, really gets that.

It’s not until he changes that he notices all the scarring. His arms and hands are hardly noticeable, not unless you were outright staring. There’s a whole line of claw marks stretching from the bottom of his ribs to the top of his thigh, and a similar set across his back. He remembers the teeth in his shoulder, dragging him along the ground and has raised, white puncture marks where they had been. That’s where the holes in his throat had been too, claw marks along the top of his shoulder and stretching just to the right of his jugular.

It almost killed him. Almost, but not quite.

After that he watches Dimara and Celia go at it in the back yard, certain that any second one of them’s going to hit the other so hard that they go flying. They’re both stronger and faster than what’s normal, angel blades in hand. Things that Vance has only ever seen in antique shops along the strip. It’s not that surprising, after everything else.

He finally works up the nerve to eat and watches Blair try to get the cereal Rooke had been reaching for down from the cupboard, and then he upends the entire thing onto the floor.

Vance still isn’t even sure that was an accident.

Dimara’s nice, Rooke’s pleasant when he decides it’s a fit time to talk. Celia leaves him alone, for the most part, and Blair just stares at him a lot.

All the times Blair isn’t looking is when he looks instead, trying to figure it out. Right now, he’s at the front door, pulling his boots on, back to Vance. He hasn’t yet convinced himself to go outside yet. He isn’t sure how he’s supposed to, especially not when it’s as dark as it is.

“Stop staring at me,” Blair says, and Vance goes very still.

“You stare at me all the time.”

Blair turns around and smiles at him. He’s not sure why that smile is so unnerving.

“Where are you going?”

“To talk to your friend.”

“My who?”

“Your friend – you know, tiny little fairy, moves really fast, talks a whole lot, found your half dead body in the woods. Ringing any bells?”

“Is that what she is?” Vance asks. He had nearly forgotten about Kelsea, with everything else going on. “She said she wouldn’t go far.”

“Think she’s in shit with the colony for saving your life. Probably on house arrest. Forest arrest. Whatever.”

“You’re going to find her now? It’s dark.”

Blair leans back up and takes a very exaggerated look out the window. “Hadn’t noticed.”

So, what, Blair’s just gonna go wandering around in the forest at night and doesn’t think anything of it? Vance wishes he had that mindset, right about now. It almost feels like he’s never going to be thinking that way ever again.

“You coming, or not?” Blair asks, and then takes a step outside. He leaves the door open.

Vance nearly trips over himself trying to get off the couch to follow.

He doesn’t have any desire to go out at night, but by the time he gets his shoes on, closes the door behind him, and gets onto the driveway Blair’s already in the field surrounding the house, uncaring for whether he gets left behind or not. If he doesn’t want to be out here at all, then he definitely has no desire to be out here alone, so he jogs until he catches up to him. Not that Blair necessarily makes him feel any better, but he did carry him back here in the first place, so that must count for something.

Vance is hoping, anyway.

He’s just not sure how Blair looks so unbothered by everything. If Vance is right, then Blair can hear everything he can. Every snap of a twig far off in the distance, every creak and bird and sound of something moving through the leaves and dirt. There are things watching him right now, and he knows it. Even though it feels like he can see better than normal, nothing’s popping into view.

“No need to have a panic attack,” Blair says, eventually. His voice is so loud and close by that Vance nearly trips right into him.

“You know there are tons of things out here, right?”

“And we’re two of them,” Blair points. “You can hear everything, you can smell everything, and everything can hear you right back. Believe me, nothing’s going to come out of the bushes and attack you again. They know what you are.”

Vance isn’t even sure he knows what the fuck he is, anymore. Even having a word for it doesn’t do wonders for his mindset about this whole thing.

He doesn’t think Blair even has a direction in mind, either. Everyone knows the fairies could spend centuries in here and no one would ever find them. Some sort of magic, concealing them from the rest of the world. They won’t be found unless they want to. They could probably walk in circles in here until dawn and find the same tree half a dozen times before they ever find Kelsea.

But they don’t have to find Kelsea.

Blair turns around before he does, but they hear it at the same time. Not footsteps. It almost just sounds like the wind, before there’s a very distinctly human noise, or as close to it as it’s going to get. A shriek, one that doesn’t sound panicked, or in danger.

Still no footsteps, but something hits him in the back all the same.

He nearly has a heart attack.

Blair moves out of the way when he stumbles forward, someone very clearly attached to his back, arms around his shoulders. He looks amused. Vance is feeling the exact opposite way.

“You’re actually okay!” Kelsea crows, directly in his ear. It feels much too loud. “I wanted to come back, I’m sorry, I may have gotten in a little bit of trouble.”

She’s not very heavy at all, but he still feels the need to grab her.

“You gotta give us some warning,” Blair says. “I want a camera next time I get a reaction opportunity like that.”

“Fuck you,” he manages, heart still pounding. Kelsea wriggles free of his hands and her feet hit the ground soundlessly. Now that he can see, and isn’t covered in blood, he doesn’t know why the fairy thing just didn’t occur to him in the first place. It’s no wonder he can’t make anything out in here. She could’ve been following alongside them this whole time and he’d have hardly seen her.

Despite the split second of terror, having Kelsea here does make him feel better. It’s that same amount of comfort from before.

“See, aren’t you glad I came and got you guys?” Kelsea asks, looking at Blair. “He’s not that bad.”

“Coming from the girl who has no natural enemies. I told you – only reason I was even at the house was because I was hiding from a pack of wolves.”

He’s really hoping the thought he just had isn’t an accurate one.

“Oh, you haven’t even told him? That’s mean.”

“To be fair,” Blair starts. “No one’s told him what anyone is, besides you. We’re just letting him figure it out. It’s like Clue.”

“This is nothing like Clue,” he insists.

“It kinda is.”

Even Clue would be easier than coming to terms with this. That thought is still swirling around in Vance’s head, pretty much already true, even if he’s unwilling to ask. There’s no way he’s wrong.

“Do you just make pop culture references to offset how old you are?” Kelsea asks. Blair stares at her.

“Do you even know what Clue is?”

“Well, no, but I have an excuse.”

Vance nearly turns around and starts walking back to the house. Kelsea must sense it, because she reaches out and grabs a hold of his sleeve before he can even take a step away from them. Blair looks right at him, like he knows exactly what Vance is thinking right now.

“Want to submit your answer?”

“Can vampires read minds?” he asks instead, and he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he shrugs.

“You’re so mean,” Kelsea insists, and then shakes his arm a bit. “He can’t, I swear. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back to the house, but I’m going to try, alright?”

“I’ll have to hold you to that,” he says. “I’m gonna run away from you now.”

He’s not even sure the direction he starts heading is the way they came from. Judging by Blair’s laugh, he’s not going to tell him. He hears them talking for quite a while, and tries to ignore every other sound, focusing on their voices for as long as he physically can. He hears them stop, and hears Blair’s footsteps not long after, getting closer. Not nearly as fast as he could move, if he really wanted to, and Vance knows it.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“You really wanna know?”

Nope. He’s taking that one back. Trying to ignore the fact that he’s being followed by a literal vampire in the middle of the woods, past midnight, but that’s what he gets for following him out here in the first place without knowing.

“Ask her how old she is, next time she shows up,” Blair says. “She won’t tell me.”

Vance’s feet stutter a little bit, in the dirt, and Blair passes him easily. He hadn’t even thought of it. What have people always said, about fairies? They look so much younger than they really are, and suddenly Vance feels very much like an infant. He wonders if anyone in the house feels like that.

Blair hasn’t stopped walking.

Vance has no choice but to follow him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I edited like, all of this on the way back from a camping trip during a five hour car ride, so. Probable apologies.


	5. Into The Light

Kelsea’s never really been in trouble to this degree before.

Their kind used to help humans. Quite a lot, honestly. But sometime before she was born, during the Civil War, all of that went away. They retreated further back into the woods than they had ever gone before. They lost a lot, in those years. More people than they had ever lost before.

It scared them all.

Kelsea can’t say she blames them. Her parents saw a lot, went through even more. So did her siblings. But that doesn’t mean that they can keep her in the trees for all of eternity, the way some of the others seem so content to stay. Half of the elders don’t ever leave the clearing. All of the young ones stay tucked under a mother’s arm, for the first hundred years.

When she hit that mark, she went running.

There wasn’t much in the area, save for the old woman that turns out to be Dimara’s grandmother. She only ever got close enough to the road to hear the cars whizzing past, but not enough to see who’s behind the wheel. She knows there are people out there that wouldn’t hesitate to run her down, for fear of their own safety.

But finding Vance changes all of that.

They don’t like wolves. That’s more a fact of life than a rule. But they usually have an agreement. They never live in the same place. They stay away from each other. When the pack rolls in looking for the vampire that she knows went wandering through, the entire group hides. They spend the whole night hidden so far in the shadows that not a single thing could pull them out, out of fear that something will rip them apart.

That doesn’t stop her from headed out, the second the sun rises.

Vance is okay. Relatively speaking, anyway. She knew they would take care of him, unlike her own family, and now she’s got real visual proof to confirm that she made the right choice. Scars aside, he’s alive. A wolf, but he’s alive.

And Kelsea can’t quite figure it out. Why they’re supposed to hate each other.

The week after her father doesn’t let her out of her sight. He’s got half the colony watching her, to make sure she doesn’t run off. But they can only keep her contained for so long.

The morning after Vance and Blair show up, her father tells her to go. Kelsea’s not sure how he knows, exactly, but he does. And she’s not about to question that; in fact, she takes off quicker than she ever has before, after she kisses him on the cheek in silent thanks.

And she doesn’t tell anyone, that she starts going back.

She’s not about to ruin that by telling someone.

The first day she opens the door without announcing her arrival and then throws herself once again onto Vance’s back and nearly knocks him into the half-open fridge.

After that, it just becomes habit.

Kelsea splits her time right down the middle. Wakes up and spends the morning out in the woods, and the entire afternoon at the house. Depending she’ll either stay there through the evening, or head back out only so that she can return later into the night. And it’s not really for any one particular reason – it’s all of them.

They’re different. Not just in the species sense. There’s something about them all that Kelsea feels like she’s meant to be a part of. She wouldn’t have found Vance in the woods that day if she wasn’t supposed to be here. That’s how Fate works, and fairies can control it, if they spend enough time working on it.

She’d rather not control Fate. She likes being surprised by it.

Nobody tries to chase her out, either. Blair jokingly scoops her up and drops her on the porch more than once, trying to insist that no one invited her. She suspects that he’s just annoyed that he’s the only one who needed an invitation. Dimara tries to show her what everything in the kitchen is, even though Celia is looking on just as mystified over her shoulder. Rooke actually talks to her, more than she sees him talking to anyone else save Dimara, and she feels genuine, real happiness bloom inside her.

She really is happy. And no one back in the woods would understand that.

And they won’t understand her accidentally falling asleep at the house, either.

Kelsea wakes up not long after dawn, the sky coloured pink and orange, sprawled out on the living room floor. The living room floor is not very comfortable, she decides, until she realizes where she is and about what time it is. She only stirs in the first place because Celia’s closed the front door, already disappearing down the front porch.

She’s in so much trouble.

She spends a solid thirty seconds trying to kick the blanket that someone laid over her off, writhing along the floor, before she goes crawling for the door. Vance mumbles something from the couch, but she doesn’t stop to really hear it.

Celia turns before she’s even fully down the stairs, far away as she is. Creepy angel thing. Or just creepy.

“What are you doing?”

“I was supposed to be home!”

“Oh. I was wondering if you were coming with me.”

“Where?”

“The beach.”

Kelsea thinks back to that first day, coercing them into coming back with her to find Vance. That’s where Celia was then too, looking suspiciously guilty about it as well. Kelsea’s never thought to ask her about that. If anyone has, she hasn’t said anything. Dimara’s probably tried to ask about it, if not Blair. That’s pretty much what the two of them do to anyone that even looks at them a weird way.

Kelsea realizes she’s still standing there, not making a single effort to get home.

Celia looks at her. “Wanna come meet a friend?”

Kelsea likes friends.

—

—

—

Celia doesn’t explain anything the whole way there.

Kelsea can’t really say she’s surprised. Celia hasn’t exactly been the most forthcoming person since they met. She knows she’s an angel. Was, anyway. She never talks about it, though. Kelsea saw more emotion on her face in those few minutes when they debated about taking Vance to the house than she has in the past two weeks.

But now she looks, dare Kelsea say it, almost a little eager.

It’s kinda weird.

Something in her seems to relax when they step onto the beach. Kelsea follows her down the sand and onto the little dock, headed out over the water. She can’t help but glance around every few seconds, worried, but it looks like Celia knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s early. Earlier than any sane human would be down here, except for a few lone runners who won’t even bother looking.

Celia’s done this before.

She doesn’t feel apprehension, necessarily, when Celia takes a seat at the edge of the dock, her legs swinging dangerously close to the water, and looks up at her. Even Kelsea doesn’t properly know what’s down there. No one does, is the issue. It could be all sorts of things, and they could be a hundred miles away or right beneath your feet.

“Just sit,” Celia insists. “Nothing’s going to bite you.”

Kelsea’s not so sure about that, even though Celia sounds like she is. She takes a seat next to her at the end of the dock but keeps her legs crossed underneath her. She’s not risking her legs.

She sits there, and stares at Celia while Celia stares at the water. Kelsea wants to look, kind of, but isn’t really sure what she’s supposed to be looking for. Just a lot of water. Far as the eye can see. Kelsea can wager a guess, as to who or what Celia is waiting for, but she’s really not about to open her mouth and ask.

The silence is kind of stressing her out.

She looks at her again. “Are you crazy?”

Celia’s still staring at the water. “Probably?”

Something, _someone_ , pops out of the water.

Kelsea absolutely does _not_ yelp at how suddenly it happens, going to her knees so that she can grip the edge of the dock and look over at the person that has suddenly appeared in the water. Not a person, clearly, because Kelsea can imagine all too well what’s hidden behind the waves.

He looks at Celia first, but his eyes widen when he looks at her, and there’s the all too familiar urge to flee in every inch of his body.

“She’s fine, don’t go anywhere,” Celia says. She hasn’t moved at all. Kelsea is still leaning over, trying to get a better look at him. He looks like, well, a person. She would fully believe he was one if she didn’t know better, because from this angle she can’t see the gills on either side of his neck, and it’s not until he pops a hand out of the water to hold onto the ladder that she’s able to see the webbing in-between his fingers.

“Kelsea, Rory. Rory, Kelsea.”

She waves, and after a moment he smiles.

“Is she one of the ones from the house?”

“Not technically,” she says, before Celia can explain it. “I’m still living in the woods almost full-time. I’m from the colony.”

“Oh. I feel like I should’ve guessed that.”

“You’ve never come out of the water in your life,” Celia insists. “Why would you know what _anything_ is?”

Rich, coming from Celia, and herself as well, both of whom who have absolutely no idea what anything is themselves. Still, it’s weird. He looks about Celia’s age, if Celia’s age was a real concrete thing. From what she knows most of them have gone on shore at least a few times by now. They watch his head swivel around, looking down the beach, but there’s nothing there.

“What’s got you so jumpy?”

“A boat capsized a few days back, down the coast. From what we’ve heard there was no mechanical failure or anything like that, so I’m afraid they’re going to start thinking it was us.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No, of course not. But some of the others have heard fisherman talking, you know? They’re apparently thinking about starting to dredge the ocean, see how many of us they can catch. If they kill us that’s one thing out of their way, and if not, they could probably sell us off.”

Kelsea has never realized the amount of danger some of them are in. Blair and Vance are pretty safe, common enough, and so is Dimara. But Celia’s nowhere close to safe, and Rory won’t be either, unless he decides to come out. She hasn’t really thought about it but going to the house all the time could endanger her as well. They come out of the woods so little people are bound to be interesting. And when people are interested, bad things happen.

“If I was to get a set of clothes and hide them somewhere, would you consider coming out, if that happened?”

“Are you going to steal Blair’s clothes?” she asks, already able to envision that far easier than she should be able to. While she’s curious herself, she’s more invested in Rory’s reaction. He looks at her, seemingly confused.

“What?” Celia asks. “You’re telling me if someone’s coming to kill you you’d rather stay?”

No is the answer there – she can see it in his eyes. He’s not very good at concealing his emotions. It’s not a real shock, now that she’s gotten over the initial surprise, that Celia keeps coming back, if he never puts up a fight about it.

After a minute, Rory shakes his head.

“Good. So, I’ll hide them down the rocks, where someone won’t take them. I’m serious. If you’re in trouble, we’ll help.”

Kelsea isn’t fully aware of when this became a _we_ , but she finds herself nodding along, already knowing that if something does happen, she’ll be here. You have to blur the lines between species here, or none of them would probably would be alive. Someone would have put Vance out of his misery, before she found him. Someone would have taken Celia, if Dimara hadn’t moved faster.

They’d all be screwed.

She looks back towards the woods, and swears she can see them moving, just beyond the thickest layer of brush, and sighs.

“I should probably go,” she says mournfully, and rises to her feet. Celia looks up at her.

“See you soon?”

“Hopefully,” she mutters, but plaster a smile back on her face when she turns to wave at Rory. “Nice to meet you, though.”

“You too. I’m usually not far, so if you ever want to come and sit down—"

She can tell what he’s trying to say. “Thanks.”

It’s progress, for someone who has probably never had any contact with someone on land that extends beyond her and Celia. She feels oddly touched, that he’d be willing to talk to her, even if Celia wasn’t around. He looked very nervous at the sight of her initially, but apparently, he knows who to trust.

She looks back at the woods and wishes her family would trust her half as much.

She glances up and down the beach, makes sure no one is watching, and disappears into the undergrowth.

—

—

—

Kelsea’s roughly a hundred and sixty years old, would be having what the humans call a _Sweet Sixteen_ if she lived out there, and she’s never raised her voice at a member of her family.

Not until now, anyway.

Her father was furious at her, when she got back. Her mother even more-so when she refused to offer up an explanation, because there isn’t one that they would understand. She just wants more than this. She doesn’t want to be stuck here and hiding all the time, a thousand years old and having seen only the same patch of woods.

No one speaks to her for almost a full day. It’s like she’s being punished. Some of the elder’s glare at her when she passes by, like they’re offended at her desire to see the outside world.

But the elders are boring.

No one’s talking to her. Her friends are all being kept safely away by their own families. It’s like talking to her will taint them, sharing the same air as her will make them want the same things she does. She can’t handle the quiet, when she knows what’s going on beyond it.

On the evening of the second day, she tries to make a break for it.

Her father grabs her arm before she’s even out of the clearing.

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk,” she replies, which isn’t a total lie.

“Not to that house.”

“And what if I was?” she asks and pulls her arm out of his grasp. He looks a little bit wounded at that. “What if I wanted to go and live out there? You can’t stop me.”

“When we go live out there, we don’t come back.”

What she wants to say is that dying out there would be better than living in here until she’s old and gray, another six to eight hundred years down the line. In here they’re safe. She gets that. Unless something kills them, they’ll live forever.

But what if she doesn’t want to live forever?

“To be honest,” she says, voice just this shy of too loud. “If I had known there was someone living up here this whole time, I’d have been there sooner. But I didn’t. And I wish I had. Because you think keeping me here is keeping me safe, and maybe that’s the truth, but what if that’s not what I want?”

“You don’t want to be safe,” he says slowly, confusion evident in his voice.

“No!” she shouts. “No, I don’t! What if I actually want to live, instead of just wandering in circles every day and growing flowers alongside the road for tourists to see? What if there’s something out there that’s better?”

He can’t tell her there isn’t, because he doesn’t know himself. The extent of the moving they’ve done is from woodland to woodland, never stepping foot on the roads, always out of sight.

“I won’t disappear,” she insists. “I _won’t_. But I’m not staying here, either.”

She’s actually properly shocked him into silence. She never thought she had power that extended beyond the grass growing under her feet, the birds following her through the woods, but this is a new one for sure. It’s four days, and she’s had enough. She’s ready to go back, and maybe not sleep on the floor this time. She wants to stay.

She turns around and heads for the trail that she knows isn’t too far away, and he never moves after her.

—

—

—

She does kind of wind up going for a walk.

There’s still a bit of lingering anger in her, and frustration, and upset air. When she gets like that, the ground tends to quake a little. Figuratively and literally. She figures no one wants her to accidentally collapse the structure of the house.

So, she does what she’s best at, and wanders in a very large circle. She only thinks to head for the beach when she remembers what Rory had offered. To be honest, she had kind of forgotten about him, in the middle of all of it. They weren’t all easy people to forget, but she had tried, in case that would help.

It hadn’t.

She knows something’s wrong before her feet even touch the sand.

She can’t smell blood, not like some other creatures can, but she feels it in another way. Right where the woods stop it’s silent. All the birds have stopped singing. There’s no rustle of anything through the grass or dirt. It’s like everything’s fled, and there’s no storm clouds on the horizon.

Something’s wrong.

The blood is evident the second she leaves the safety of the trees, and the thought of safety behind her is still something she’ll never stop thinking. The shoreline is teeming with people, the water full of boats dragging nets, but worse of all is the bodies, lying just out of reach of the water. Some are still moving, restrained at the wrists, tails bloodied and weighed down by nets but there are some that are very obviously already gone, covered in their own blood and twisted in awkward heaps throughout the sand.

She dives back into the trees, heart hammering, and forces herself to stay there and breathe. There’s at least a dozen of them, maybe half dead, and when she turns her head back to the water she watches one of the boats way out past the dock drag another one in – a tail that would normally be the colour of a deep, twilight sky thrashing frantically before it’s dropped in.

There’s no way this should be real. Just because Rory said it might happen doesn’t mean—

Oh, god. Rory.

She was so panicked she didn’t even think about him, just thought about getting back into cover before someone laid eyes on her and came this way. But now he’s all she’s thinking about. Celia must’ve come down and dropped the clothes off by now, but there’s no way she’s getting around all these people to check the rocks and see if they’re gone. She forces herself to really look at all the bodies on the beach, but none of them look like him. She’s hoping. Maybe in her panic she’s just not noticing, or maybe she’s just forcing herself not to see it.

“Kelsea?”

She spins around, hits her shoulder into a tree, and then trips. It’s about the least graceful thing she’s done in the past hundred years.

The first thing she notices about Rory is how desperately he’s clinging to a sapling with both hands, blood streaming down his left arm.

The second thing she notices is, well, the legs.

“You have legs,” she says very obviously, and he opens his mouth and then closes it again.

“And it occurred to me two seconds after I got out that I have no idea how to use them.”

That … makes a lot of sense, actually. Newborns spend a whole lot of time crawling, before someone props them up, and even then, they’re still wobbly. Rory’s never had legs in his entire _life_. The fact that he made it this far is a miracle.

He’s still bleeding, a sharp tear across his bicep. There’s things in here that’ll smell that blood, things in here that would kill for it.

She shakes herself and rushes up to his side, grabbing him by the waist. “Okay, we gotta go.”

“What about—”

“There’s nothing either of us are going to be able to do.”

The colony won’t help. They would never risk themselves like this to help out another species. She could run back to the house and leave him here, but there’s no telling if someone could find him, and what are they going to do? They can’t fight the entire fisherman population on the Cape.

Well, Blair could. But she’s not about to suggest adding to the massacre that’s already down on the beach.

Rory is still staring over her head, through what little the foliage is giving away. He’s shaking like a leaf. She can’t tell if it’s because he’s that unsteady, or if it’s because he’s scared. He probably knows all of them, if they were that close by. He’s staring at the dead bodies of people he considers family, knowing what will happen to the ones that have had the misfortune to live.

This is worse than fear, this is horrifying.

And they could be next, if they don’t move.

—

—

—

There’s no one at the house when Kelsea manages to get him back there, nearly two hours later.

It’s a process. She’s half his size, and he really doesn’t know how to walk. It’s like watching a newborn fawn trying to navigate the woods for the first time away from it’s mother side, and that’s not because they’re both equally gangly. Trying to prop him up the whole time is nearly impossible, but she doesn’t really have time to teach him how to walk properly.

Every time she hears a noise, she worries that someone saw them and decided to follow. This far from the beach they’d probably both get shot and dragged back. They wouldn’t care what either of them were.

When she throws open the front door she’s not sure whether to be relieved or not, that no one’s here. The car’s gone, but she thought that maybe one person would still be here.

Apparently not.

She’s really not sure what the hell she’s supposed to do, and Rory definitely doesn’t, so telling him that will get the both of them nowhere. She edges him inside, slams the door shut with her foot, and turns around to see Rooke standing at the other end of the hall, staring at the both of them. He looks confused. That’s better than horrified.

“Can you get me like, a first aid kit?” she asks, panting.

“We don’t have one?”

She mutters something under her breath, while Rory and Rooke stare at each other in silence. She resumes dragging him away from the door and down the hall, to the bathroom on the right. She gently lowers him onto the edge of the tub, and then stands there, flustered and unaware of what she’s supposed to do.

The bleeding’s stopped, mostly, but he’s not healing. Do they not heal faster than normal? Should she ask that?

“Do you want me to call Dimara?” Rooke asks quietly, instead of asking who Rory is. “They should be back soon.”

“No,” she insists. “I can – I can deal with this?”

She shouldn’t have phrased that as a question. Both of them are looking at her like they expected her to hold the key to the universe and just found out she didn’t. With them both scrutinizing her she feels the panic build a little bit. This is what her father meant, when he told her what happened outside. This is exactly what could happen to her.

Rooke puts a hand on her shoulder, and the cold of it shocks her a little bit back into the real world. “What happened?”

How does she even begin to explain what happened, when she doesn’t even really know? Rory looks like he’s about to either cry or throw up, and she can’t say she’d blame him for either one. She’s more leaning towards crying, but that’s all frustration. She’s been feeling that a lot today. It was a bloodbath, and they did nothing wrong, and this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. The real world isn’t supposed to look like this.

But she can’t go running back. Not that she would really want to. She knows that this is just a brief, momentary freak out, and it will end soon.

“I think they’re back,” Rooke says, and leans out of the bathroom. Rory’s eyes widen. Kelsea realizes she hasn’t thought this through at all. Did Celia ever have a conversation with someone, about bringing him back here? Was that what she was supposed to do, or was she supposed to dump him back in the ocean somewhere further away?

Well, she’s decided what she’s doing, apparently. There’s no getting him out of the house before someone gets in.

He’s here now, to stay.

“I’m gonna hide,” Rooke says, and then promptly abandons her. By the time she steps out into the hallway he’s vanished, which leaves her standing there alone with Rory staring after her as Blair comes through the front door.

The only thing Kelsea is very aware of is that Blair doesn’t stop because he’s surprised to see _her_. He stops not a foot inside the door, and Vance walks into his back. His eyes narrow, eyes flitting around. Why in the world did she think someone wasn’t going to notice? What was she going to do, hide him in the bathroom the entire day?

“Who else is here?” Blair asks slowly, and that’s when Vance starts looking around. “That’s not your blood I smell.”

Yep, he was literally the worst person in the world to try and hide this from. What did that take him, all of two seconds?

“Dimara!” he continues, yelling back outside. “Kelsea brought someone else in your house.”

That’s Celia’s cue to shove herself around Vance and into the house, eyes falling on her immediately. Seeing Celia kinda makes her feel a little better, and she’s sure Rory will think the same thing. It doesn’t take Celia very long either. She must be able to put two and two together, because realization dawns on her face, and then she’s moving around Kelsea and making a beeline right for the bathroom, disappearing in before she can even begin to try at an explanation.

Blair’s quick to go after her, which means it’s just Vance staring at her, and then Dimara as she steps off the porch, already looking exasperated.

“I’m sorry,” she says in a rush. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Really should just put a sign above the door,” Dimara mutters. She drops the shopping bags by the front door and then goes after them into the bathroom.

“Why is he wearing my clothes?” Blair says all of a sudden, and there’s a sound from the bathroom indicating that someone’s hitting him. Too much for such a small space, and there’s already four people in there. Kelsea will just force herself to stay out here for the rest of eternity, apparently, and she’s fine with it.

She jumps when Vance grabs her arm, unaware that he had gotten so close.

“You okay?” he asks quietly, and she nods frantically. He’s staring down, at the small drips of blood all over her hands, where they had fallen from Rory’s arm.

“Yeah – yeah, I’m good. It’s not mine.”

“I know that. That doesn’t mean you’re okay though.”

No. No, it really doesn’t. She gently tugs free of his grasp in order to wrap her arms around his waist, because right now she juts really needs a hug. Everything just changed for her in the span of a few hours. She left, and she doesn’t think she’s going back, and she’s already gotten a taste of just how brutal the outside world can be, when she was so optimistic about it before.

Vance wraps his arms around her shoulders and squeezes. “Just take a deep breath.”

That’s what he’s been doing, or so he’s said. Just trying to take deep breaths to get himself through all of this, and so far he’s still standing.

So, she takes her own deep breath, but lets herself stay there for a minute.

She really wasn’t lying about needing a hug.

—

—

—

Trying to integrate Rory into the house is almost a little funny.

They’re all so focused on him that no one really questions the fact that she never leaves again. Dimara looks at her funny, the next morning, but there’s nothing else after that. She reckons everyone just accepts that she was going to be here permanently one of these days, it’s just a little sooner than even she expected.

She never thought this would be her life, in which they’re currently trying to teach a twenty year old how to walk without holding onto something. He’s doing better. He made it down the stairs this morning on his own, even if the process was painfully slow and Blair had walked by him six odd times, like he was trying to rub it in.

But he’s getting better.

Not much else.

After they patched up his arm Dimara and Blair both trekked down to the beach and came back not long after looking varying shades of horrified and pissed off. Kelsea can only imagine that it got worse but refused to ask. Not with Rory around. Dimara and Blair don’t bother saying anything, either, so she probably doesn’t want to know.

What she does know is that there’s no taking him back safely, and even if they could somehow figure it out who knows how many of them are still left, below the surface.

Probably not very many.

So it’s a welcome distraction, trying to teach him things. Showing him everything in the house. He’s pretty jumpy, the same way Rooke is, so it’s odd to see them interact with each other like two completely normal people, one of the only times neither of them jump at any sudden movement or noise. No one’s fighting each other or destroying anything, so it’s a win in Kelsea’s book.

There’s the issue of sleeping, though.

Celia lost her room almost immediately to Vance, so now she pretty much exclusively sleeps in Dimara’s room, or wherever she happens to fall asleep. Rooke has never once opened his door, not that she’s seen. Kelsea could take the last room upstairs, but she hands that over to Rory pretty easily, not even thinking about it. Half the time she sleeps on the couch and the other half she sleeps on Vance’s floor, because all Blair does at night is wander and sometimes it freaks her out, to see him move so soundlessly in the dark right past her.

There’s more bedrooms in the basement, but it’s packed to the brim with old furniture and boxes and you can hardly take a step in any direction without bumping into something.

She makes that her job.

Dimara’s the one buying groceries and clothing them and making sure the electricity stays on, so Kelsea figures they need to do something. Even though Blair’s disappeared, once again, and she’s pretty sure Vance is outside, she makes sure to drag Celia downstairs after her in the middle of the afternoon, because there’s no way she’s doing this alone.

There’s really no good place to start. There’s stuff everywhere. She can’t even see the back wall.

Celia knocks a chair over, and Kelsea is only halfway through her very first box when she hears someone coming down the stairs. She looks away quickly, because there’s only one person that would be taking that long.

“Stairs are hard,” Rory complains, and then sits down with a thump at the very bottom, looking extremely drained.

“Stairs do that to be the best of us,” Celia says, and he cracks a smile. At least he doesn’t look so miserable anymore. Together they push a wide stack of boxes up to his feet, so that he doesn’t have to move to help them. They can use as many hands as they can get.

It’s going to take a lot longer than just today, though. With the amount of stuff all seven of them will have to be down here at some point, over the course of multiple days. And then there’s the question of reorganizing everything of value, getting rid of anything that isn’t.

She’s already tired.

“Uh, guys?”

She looks up, unaware of the last time she had her head more than halfway out of a box. Rory’s almost made it to the bottom of his own stack, and the second last box doesn’t appear to have much more in it other than yellowing papers and some very thick, old books. He’s holding onto one of said papers, the back side of it so faded she can almost see through to the other side. A picture, looks like. Several pictures, with a large block of text underneath, some written off to the side. There’s stuff scribbled in the margins too, but so old and faded that she can’t even begin to read it.

“What?” she asks eventually. He’s still reading. She watches his eyes flick back up to the beginning, starting over.

Celia reaches over and snatches the paper out of his hands, turning it over. Now Kelsea can really see the picture, a grainy, black and white shot of a very ordinary looking man. She still can’t make out any of the words, and it doesn’t look like any of the scrawl was legible to begin with.

“That,” Rory starts, voice strained. He hasn’t closed his mouth. “That’s his last name, right? Isn’t it?”

Celia’s face has gone completely blank. She’s usually pretty stoic, that or smirking, so to see her face completely devoid of any emotion at all is pretty startling. So much so that Kelsea _doesn’t_ move, because there’s something in her that doesn’t want to.

Something flickers in the corner of her vision and she looks above Rory, further up the stairs. Rooke has appeared there, leaning around the bend to look at all three of them. If Celia is unreadable, then he is too, but for all the wrong reasons. There are too many emotions there, the switch between them too fast to be distinguishable.

“Rooke,” Celia says slowly, and he _disappears_.

He doesn’t run back up the stairs. One second he’s there and the next he’s _gone_. Kelsea’s watching him and then a heartbeat later she’s staring at the blank wall that was behind him, trying to reconcile that there wasn’t a sound, and that it was like someone snapped a finger, did a cheap magic trick and he’s gone—

“Rooke!” Celia yells. She basically vaults half over Rory and scrambles up the stairs, dropping the paper between them, but Kelsea doesn’t know if there’s a point to that. It’s not like he ran off. There’s no chasing him.

Rory is still staring up the stairs, mouth agape, and she watches in silent shock as he hauls himself to his feet after her. It takes him a minute, but finally she’s alone in the basement as Rory finally makes it to the top.

She leans down, slowly, and turns the paper over. She lifts her hand back, after that, like she doesn’t want to touch it. Maybe if she doesn’t what she thinks is happening won’t be.

The picture is still the same. Most of the writing is gibberish; descriptions of people and locations and things that don’t make any sense to her. But the closer she gets to the end, the more worried she gets. The more it’s starting to sound like exactly what she was dreading without even knowing it. It’s the last sentence, separated from the rest, that makes her understand exactly what everyone was feeling. No matter how different the emotions were, she understands all of them with perfect clarity.

The first half could be attached to almost anything. She reads it three times before her eyes finally settle on the last few words.

She stares at them, and then looks up the stairs. The spot is still empty. She can hear them stomping around up on the main floor, but not getting any response.

And they’re not going to.

She takes a deep breath. “Wanted for the murder of Rooke Arvelle; July 1st, 1946.”

He’s dead.

And she doesn’t think he’s coming back, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no explanation. When do I ever?


	6. Where You Left Your Heart

“I sleep for the first time in two weeks and you guys choose now to go around yelling?” Blair asks, looking bleary-eyed. He’s squinting at the light even more than usual. “This is awful.”

“Then leave,” Celia spits.

Rory hasn’t been this genuinely worried about her state of mind since she fell into the ocean and nearly drowned.

That has to say a lot.

He can’t stop staring at Blair though, who just came out of _Rooke’s_ room. Blair who looks more annoyed by their yelling than concerned about who’s name is coming out of their mouths. When does he ever, though?

“He’s around here somewhere, please stop yelling,” Blair pleads. “I just wanna sleep, and he probably wants you to chill before he comes out.”

Rory is already looking at Blair, so he doesn’t have to move. Celia very slowly turns around and looks him dead in the eye. Kelsea pauses at the top of the stairs, clutching the paper to her chest.

“Are you telling me,” Celia says, forcing every word out. “That you knew?”

Blair raises his eyebrows. “Are you telling me you… didn’t?”

“Are you fucking serious?” Celia shouts, and Kelsea jumps. “You’re telling me you knew he was— you knew he was _dead_ this entire time and never thought you should, you know, maybe bring that shit up?”

“I knew the second I saw him!” Blair responds, indignant. “How the fuck did you _not_? You’re an angel, you see goddamn ghosts all the time and you’re telling me you didn’t have a clue?”

Celia definitely didn’t have a clue. Rory’s too busy trying to wrap his head around the word _ghost_ and not fall over. It feels like he’s approaching that path anyway, and Kelsea looks like she’s about to follow him. That’ll be two of them down, Rooke vanished into thin air, and Celia and Blair maybe quite possibly having an argument about someone who’s dead.

God, it’s not amazing to think of it that way.

“Listen,” Blair starts. “He was jumpy around me, apparently because I was the only one that knew, but he warmed up. It was fine. Just – just calm down, Jesus.”

Rory can’t help but wonder if swearing on Jesus is cancelled out, when it’s an angel you’re talking to, and it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t look like Celia’s ever going to calm down. Kelsea’s hands are shaking where they’re still holding tight to the paper, like she doesn’t plan to let go of it. This isn’t the same kind of nauseous he felt when he saw the first body get dragged up the beach, when the hook sliced through his arm, but it’s not far off either.

“The fact that you’re calm about this is astounding to me,” Celia says.

Blair points at himself. “Already died once, thanks. And if I could remember it, I’m sure I wouldn’t be talking about it either.”

The door cracks open, and he swivels around. Vance pokes his head in, eyes narrowing when he notices them all congregated on the second floor, looking over the railing back down at him. They don’t look suspicious at all.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Who died?”

“Do not,” Celia snaps, and Kelsea makes a small, upset noise. Vance looks slightly alarmed at that, and turns to look at him, like he’ll be any nicer or offer up an explanation. But Rory doesn’t know how to get around this either. And it’s not just Vance. Dimara will get back eventually, and they’ll have to explain to her why Rooke is just _gone a_ nd Rory really hopes it’s not him that falls on, because it’s not going to come out right.

She’s not going to take this well. Celia’s only angry because it startled her, and she hates that. Kelsea’s upset. He’s confused.

Blair still just looks like he wants to go to sleep.

Without that paper, it would pretty much be a normal morning.

—

—

—

He’s right.

Dimara is not pleased in the slightest.

The paper almost gets torn in half when she reads it, still in Kelsea’s hands at the time, and then snatches it away. Vance about has a heart attack and goes pacing around the house at twice the normal speed anyone else would, with Kelsea only following him a rough half the time. Dimara goes back into Rooke’s room to talk to Blair, who apparently thinks sleeping is still the answer to all of his problems.

Once Vance stops pacing, she starts. She opens every single door in the house and then slams it shut. Spends fifteen minutes tearing stuff apart in the basement before she comes back up, hair a mess and looking spectacularly pissed off, even worse than Celia.

It’s not at Rooke. It’s the fact that she didn’t know.

Dimara was the first one in here, the first one that talked to him. She spent an entire night in the same house as him alone and never had an inkling, only for Blair to figure it out immediately two days later. Supernatural senses aside, which would be considering cheating in Dimara’s book, that must not feel good.

She’s literally sheltering them all. Indirectly, she’s become their protector.

For this to happen? It’s not good.

And no matter how silent everyone goes, Rooke never flickers back in. It’s like he was never here.

So, Blair sleeps. Dimara very angrily makes food and pretty much forces them all to eat. Celia goes into the bathroom and doesn’t come out for nearly two hours. Rory sits on the couch and watches Vance do what is almost considered laps around the porch. Kelsea goes outside and just plops herself down in the tall grass at the edge of the driveway, like that’s normal.

What about this is normal?

Rory, to his credit, just does what he can. Eats what she gives him. Stares. Keeps quiet and hopes.

He gives up when the sun goes down and heads upstairs, only to nearly fall over.

So, legs fall asleep. That’s great information to have.

Even when he gets to his bed real sleep doesn’t come. He stares at the ceiling for a while, at the crack of light seeping in through the curtains. Every time something flickers in the corner of his eye he starts, wondering. The littlest of noises has him opening his eyes again, wondering if Rooke’s finally come back. Even when he knows it’s one of the others he still has this delusional hope inside him.

There had been a lot of emotions in Rooke’s eyes, when they had all looked at him, but the fear was overwhelming.

And what was he scared of? That they’d hate him? That they wouldn’t care? If that’s it, then Rory doesn’t really get it. Kelsea dragged him in here and Dimara spent the next half hour cleaning and bandaging his arm like she just did this all the time and never really questioned it.

She’s collecting strays. Apparently, she is one herself, now that she’s all alone in life.

Realistically, this is the best place for Rooke to be.

His door cracks open, and he sits up too fast and nearly sets his head spinning. It’s only Celia that slips in, which does a lot to calm his racing heart, but he doesn’t think the feeling itself is going away anytime soon.

“Can’t sleep either?” she asks. She flops down on the other side of the bed once he shakes his head, inspecting the ceiling with as much intensity as he previously was. He looks up at it too, with nothing better to do.

With her here it makes him feel a bit less on edge. He focuses on the soft sound of her breathing rather than listening for any possible sounds out in the hall. He’ll drive himself insane if he keeps searching for something that won’t come.

“This is fucked,” Celia says after a moment, and then rolls over so her face is buried in the pillow.

He hums in agreement. “No sign of him still?”

“Nothing. Dimara left some food in the fridge; she’s at least hoping he eats something, when we’re all asleep, so we knew he was here, but—”

“He doesn’t have to eat,” Rory interrupts quietly. “Or change his clothes. Or sleep. But he was for us. Not for him.”

He was acting and functioning like a normal human being for them. Keeping up with the charade so that no one got suspicious.

“It might’ve been for him.”

“What makes you think that?”

“1946,” she says simply. “You think he’s been up here this whole time?”

Rory hadn’t thought about it like that. If that’s the case, then he’s probably had very little human contact. Dimara’s grandmother, at least a little bit, but probably not much else, at least not for quite some time now. Maybe Celia’s right. Maybe acting like a human being was a relief to him, after so many years.

He didn’t have to be here when Dimara first showed up. He could have disappeared and waited until she left.

But he didn’t.

“You think he’ll come back?” he asks quietly, and she shrugs. He just wishes someone had an idea.

“What about you?” Celia questions. “Are you going to go back?”

He looks at her, face half turned out of the pillow. Her expression hasn’t changed one bit, but he thinks there’s a part of her that truly wants to know. If only he had an answer for that either.

He really doesn’t know much.

“It’s calmed down,” she continues. “You could get back in and swim far enough away before anyone noticed.”

He probably could. She went down there yesterday and looked again. All the bodies are gone, supposedly. Only a few lingering fishermen left, watching the water for any signs of disturbance. All it would take is one moment, for him to slip under the waves, and then he could be gone. They wouldn’t catch him.

“I’m scared,” he admits.

“Of what?”

“Of going back. Of seeing who’s left.”

He’s not scared, he’s terrified. And heartbroken, and in mourning for things that he knows are for sure gone and for others that he’s suspecting are as well. That’s all he had. All he’s ever known. His family, and his friends. All of that’s gone, save for the very small part of himself he left back in the water that he’s never getting back now.

“You don’t have to go,” she murmurs. “I just thought you would.”

Everyone does. He’s sure they’re all waiting for the morning when he heads down to the beach and doesn’t come back.

“I’m gonna stay,” he says quietly. “At least for a bit.”

It’s dark, but she still looks slightly pleased. “Good. Still gotta get you running.”

“That is not going to end well,” he mutters. They could all run circles around him. Blair could run halfway across the country before he even made it to the road. It’s not just pathetic; it’s embarrassing. He may like being here, but he’s still not on board with the whole leg thing.

Celia laughs – she’s probably envisioning the same thing he is. Faceplanting in the driveway, tripped by nothing other than air itself. Supposedly she was the same way, at first, but flight or not, at least she knew how to walk. She’s still laughing when she pushes herself up and out of the bed, headed back to the door.

“’Night,” she says, an amused grin still on her face, and he smiles back, equally uncomfortable with whatever his stomach is doing every time he so much as looks at her.

She closes the door, and he quickly wipes the smile off his face. The darkness of the empty room closes back in on him and he lays back down, the ceiling his only friend once again, but at least he’s memorized it.

There’s a big reason he’s not in a rush to go back.

A big reason why he could imagine staying.

Maybe permanently.

—

—

—

The food is still in the fridge when they wake up.

Blair eats it all before ten in the morning, and from what he remembers of Dimara’s teachings he’s pretty sure spaghetti was not intended to be a breakfast food.

They spend the entire day walking on eggshells. Everyone’s afraid to leave the house, in case he come back, but no one really wants to stay, either.

Rory basically pushes them all out the door the next morning.

There’s enough room for all five of them in Dimara’s car. He doesn’t need to go. They’re probably all going to get wrangled into some form of shopping, and he doesn’t really feel like dragging his feet around for hours on end anyway.

He hasn’t been alone in what feels like forever.

Not that there’s much to do around here, unless he wants to venture back down into the basement on his own and continue cleaning. He’s not even sure where the paper eventually ended up, because it’s not like someone stuck it to the fridge.

He tries to make himself breakfast. Key word being _tries_. He burns two sets of toast before he gives up and settles on cereal, which almost gets put on a plate he takes so long to find a bowl in the midst of everything else.

He has no idea what he’s doing, or the faintest clue what Lucky Charms are. All he does know is that he spent twenty minutes previously watching Kelsea pick all of the colorful bits out of it and eat them when she thought no one was looking, before she pelted the other stuff at Vance. It can’t be that bad.

He’s only sitting for maybe two minutes when the floor creaks, alarmingly loud.

The whole house makes that noise; even worse in the wind. But since they left it’s been silent. The television’s not on. There’s nothing that would cause that noise, not as still as everything else is.

Not unless…

He very quickly shoves a spoonful of cereal in his mouth, trying to look busy. He’s not, but he’s trying. The floor creaks against, the sound long and drawn out. It almost sounds hesitant, if that’s possible. He didn’t know he could eat cereal and not breathe at the same time.

Rooke leans around the corner to look in the kitchen, just barely, and he definitely is not breathing. Rory can hardly see his face but doesn’t need to. The hesitance in his footsteps said it all. His lips are pursed together, and there’s no obvious breath in his lungs but Rory can tell that he wouldn’t be breathing either, if he was in the first place.

“Hey,” he says quietly, and Rooke looks back down the hallway, and then into the living room.

“No one else is here,” he continues quickly, but Rooke probably knew that. That’s why he waited. But Rory is still here, and Rooke knew that too. He still chose now to appear.

That’s – that’s what progress, is, right?

Rooke is staring at him like an owl. Rory isn’t sure if he’s about to disappear again or just very obviously run off. It’s like he can follow him very quickly.

Rooke swallows. “Are you eating cereal with no milk?”

Rory looks down the bowl, confused. “Are you – is that what you’re supposed to do?”

Rooke stares at him. Rory sighs and gets back up.

He tries not to feel bad when Rooke leans out back into the hallway as he passes, still trying to keep distance between them. He grabs the milk out of the fridge before he sits back down to fill the bowl, nearly to the brim.

“You’re going to spill it,” Rooke says.

“You just told me to put milk in it. That’s what I did.”

“I didn’t _tell_ you to. That’s just how you eat it.”

He takes another spoonful and drips milk all over the table but has to admit that Rooke is right. It does taste better this way; not so much like sawdust anymore. He chews very slowly through the whole bite, and then puts the spoon down. “You can sit.”

Rooke probably doesn’t want to sit, and it’s no fault of his. He’s still gripping uneasily at the doorframe with his hand, and chances another look down the hall. Still nothing. They both know it. Rory stretches out his leg and fumbles around underneath the table until he pushes the opposite chair out. At least legs are good for one thing.

It feels like it takes an hour, in which Rory takes approximately two and a half bites of his no longer sawdust Charms, because he’s too busy trying to discreetly watch him. Rooke eventually inches into the kitchen and sits down on the edge of the chair.

He doesn’t really look – well, dead. He’s no paler than Blair is. There are the faintest shadows under his eyes, naturally the product of too little sleep, but that’s not it. He’s got the hood of his sweater drawn up over his head, zipped up nearly to his chin. He looks like he’s ready to go back into hiding, and Rory realizes that’s kind of how he’s looked all along.

It’s really hard not to feel guilty about that.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“ _I’m_ sorry.”

“For what?”

Rooke swallows. “I— I don’t know, everything? I’m sorry, I just—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” he murmurs. “I didn’t tell you everything that happened with me, did I?”

“But I still knew,” Rooke insists. “You guys didn’t know I was—”

Dead. A ghost. However Rooke finishes that sentence, Rory feels his heart clench, but forces that down. He can’t freak out right now, no matter how much he wants to.

“To be fair, you don’t exactly look it.”

Rooke reaches up so fast that Rory blinks a few times, for how slow and cautious he’s been the past few minutes. He pulls the hood down and then yanks the zipper down to nearly his chest, and Rory stops tracking the motion of his hand because all his attention immediately goes to the bruising all around his neck, so dark they’re nearly black, all the way around. All his blood goes cold at the sight of them, obvious and impossible to ignore in how wide and dark they are, right in the center of his neck. It’s no wonder he always looks the same, why it always looked like he was hunched over and hiding himself.

That’s exactly what he was trying to do.

He takes a deep breath, and it hurts. “Murdered. That’s what the paper said.”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t just one person though,” he says. “There was what, half a dozen descriptions on that paper?”

“More than that,” Rooke murmurs. “That’s just who my family figured out. I didn’t even recognize most of them. It was hard to get a good look.”

He sits, quietly, and doesn’t say a word. Of course he wants to know. Everyone’s going to want to know. But he’s hoping that the progress will continue of its own course.

“They broke in when everyone else was gone,” Rooke says. “I heard them kick the door down, but I didn’t even know what I should do, before they were on me. Just beating me into the floor. And I was barely conscious, but they dragged me back to the front door and something closed in around my neck, and I—”

“Hey,” he says quietly. “They’re gone, you know that.”

That doesn’t mean there’s no reason for his voice to be shaking the way it is, for him to not be terrified. Rory glances back towards the hall, and even though he can’t see the front door from here he can imagine it. Them dragging his bleeding body down the hall. Pulling him up into the open doorway by his neck, cutting off his air, killing him.

“I woke up,” Rooke continues, voice still shaking. “Except it wasn’t really like waking up. One second I didn’t feel anything and the next I was just standing in the living room, except I could see my body hanging in the doorway, and I heard the car pull up and – and my mom was just _screaming_ and she didn’t even make it into the house but no matter what I said no one would look at me, and when I tried to touch someone it was like I would go right through them. It was like I wasn’t there.”

“A group of people came in this house and killed you. That’s not random.”

“I saw things for years,” he says, eyes a tad more faraway then they were before. “Things out in the woods, you know? Things that would disappear when you looked away for a second. Movements, and shadows. People here didn’t like that. Most of them were descendants from the people that moved up here after Salem happened. When you started talking about seeing things – it never ended well. But I saw something.”

“Saw what?”

“You’ll think I’m crazy. Everyone else did.”

Rory stares at him. “Crazier than anybody else in this house? Unlikely.”

“A man. A horse. And shadows – so many shadows. Every night for a month, maybe. As long as I stayed up after everyone else went to sleep it was there, right at the edge of the field. And people started dying. Just vanishing in the middle of the night. So, I started telling people. I thought that maybe it would help, but the opposite happened. It just made everything worse. They had the Sheriff come to my house and tell me to keep quiet, or something bad was going to happen.”

“People are superstitious,” Rory says slowly. “It’s better now, then it used to be. But that doesn’t – that doesn’t mean someone had to come up here and kill you. Were enough people not dying as is?”

“I wouldn’t shut up,” Rooke says, and shrugs. “They didn’t care. They strung me up and I felt my feet leave the ground, but before I blacked out the first one, the one that broke the door down, he went back onto the porch. And he said _he’s the last one_ – _you’re not getting anyone else_.”

“They believed you.”

He shrugs again. “Maybe. But it never came back, after that, so maybe it worked. Or maybe it was never really there. Maybe I just imagined it the entire time.”

“You didn’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but I know that you’re only thinking that because you’ve spent so many years wondering. You know what you saw. You wouldn’t have told everyone if you thought you were imagining it.”

Rory’s on the same page as Celia now. Angry. Confused. Perplexed as to how this is all happening. He gets up from the table, left foot numb once again, and turns around to look out the window. The field’s been empty this whole time, the treeline still.

There’s nothing there.

“I’m telling you, it hasn’t come back.”

But it was there in the first place. Rory isn’t lying – he believes him. Just because no one else saw it doesn’t mean it’s not real. If that was the case half the world wouldn’t be real. The sound of the car coming up the drive pulls him back out it, makes him less angry once again.

Behind him, Rooke pulls the zipper of his sweater back up lightning fast, eyes going wide. He’s going to freak out and vanish again. He’s going to get bombarded with five people demanding an explanation and wondering where he’s been, and if that happens, they’re going to lose him. Rory’s certain of that.

“Stay here,” he pleads. “Please.”

There’s no telling if Rooke’s actually going to listen to him, but Rory heads for the front door anyway, trying his damnedest not to imagine what actually happened in this hallway. It’s too much to imagine. He makes it off the porch and onto the driveway before the cars even fully stopped. Record time, for him.

“Wow, that was impressive,” Celia says. “Like, seven out of ten.”

“What’s up?” Dimara asks. He’s standing at the top of the driveway just staring at all of them, slightly wide-eyed, and turns back to look at the front door. He can see it like he was there, and he doesn’t want to.

“He – he’s back.”

“What,” Kelsea yelps, diving out of the car, and she nearly manages to get right past him before he gets a good hold on her arm and drags her back.

“Just listen for a second,” he insists. “He almost didn’t come back when it was just me. If all five of you run in there right now, he’s going to freak.”

“Think he already freaked,” Blair says, and side-steps him in his quest to get into the house.

“You don’t know everything.”

“Most of us don’t know everything,” he points out. “Been that way for a long time for me.”

Alright, fair enough. Rory doesn’t really think Blair’s going to do anything anyway. He knew longer than any of them did, and never caused any fuss about it.

“Just try and act normal. Please.”

There’s a very long pause, and Vance steps around him too. “Well. I have to go use the bathroom.”

There’s no sudden outburst from the house now that Blair’s inside, and Vance goes in too with nothing resulting of it. Rory lets go of Kelsea’s arm, surprised to see her stay put as he heads back into the house.

Much to his surprise, Rooke is still sitting in the kitchen. Looking down at the table, sitting on his hands, hunched over once again. Rory sits down and pushes himself a little way around the table, closer to Rooke. His eyes flick up again, still nervous, but he seems to settle when he realizes that Rory isn’t intent on doing anything other than eating his now extremely soggy cereal.

Dimara comes in, eventually, and Rooke goes completely still in the chair next to him. Her eyes linger on the two of them for a moment before she opens the fridge and grabs a water bottle. It’s Kelsea that creeps in after her, pretty much openly staring. Rory didn’t expect her to be very good at this.

“I’m sorry,” she says in a rush. “I just need to—”

She practically sprints through the kitchen and before anyone can tell her otherwise throws her arms around Rooke from the side. He nearly falls out of the chair, and Rory has to hold an arm out to catch him by the shoulder to stop the both of them from careening into the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats, muffled into his shoulder, but before she can pull back Rooke wriggles an arm free to wrap it around her shoulders. He still kind of look like he wants to disappear, like he’s forcing himself to stay still for her benefit, but the smile on her face when he does it seems to be worth all of that.

Dimara clearly thinks so too, turned around to watch the two of them, but her eyes narrow when they land on him.

“What the fuck are you eating?”

He pauses. “Lucky Charms?”

“Where are the marshmallows?”

He looks down at the bowl, trying to figure out what she means. Kelsea’s eyes widen a little bit, enough to look completely and undeniably guilty, but Dimara hasn’t noticed. She very carefully removes herself from Rooke’s arm and slinks out of the kitchen.

Rooke smiles, just a little bit, and Dimara turns on him.

“It wasn’t me,” he says quickly, before she can even ask.

“Then who was it?”

He shrugs, even though he clearly _knows_ , and Dimara rolls her eyes.

“It was Kelsea,” Blair calls from the other room, followed by the very distinct sound of someone getting hit by something, and then Celia cackling.

It’s as close to normal as they’ve been the past few days. Dimara pokes her head around the corner into the living room and starts yelling, because someone’s either getting beat up or they’re about to break something.

And it’s like he said – that’s normal.

Right now, normal’s good.

Rooke clearly thinks so too, judging by the slight smile that’s still on his face.

—

—

—

Rory thinks that only a certain amount of each of them really exists in the house.

In fact, Rooke’s probably the only one, who exists in no other place.

There’s still a part of him hovering just above the ocean floor, a piece he’s not sure he’ll ever have the courage to dive back down and get. A shred of Blair’s humanity, back where he was killed. Celia’s still halfway up in the sky, part of Dimara is still living back in her grandmother’s apartment. Kelsea and Vance both deep in the woods, living and bleeding out alongside each other.

It’s weird though. None of them are properly whole but the pieces they do have fit together almost seamlessly, even where it seems like they shouldn’t.

He almost hates how comfortable he feels, when he sits down in the living room with the others, because he shouldn’t feel this way.

But he can’t stop it, either.

It’s not as long as he thought it would be, before Rooke eventually comes creeping in. He’s been gone for a few hours – either disappeared or just wandering around. At one point he pulled Dimara off, presumably to repeat the whole story, but Rory doesn’t know if he’s told anyone else.

But no one’s really harassed him for it, either. It’s hard not knowing, but sometimes the truth is even worse.

It all comes out eventually, anyway.

Vance pulls his legs up and Rooke sits down in their place, after staring for a few seconds. Miraculously, no one says anything. There’s no noise save for the voices coming from the very old, seemingly very corny reality show that’s currently playing.

His sweater is still zipped up all the way, but the hood is off.

Still baby steps?

Regardless of how hard all of them just try to focus and not make a big deal of it, Rooke doesn’t make it easy. He fidgets for a full minute before Blair finally looks at him, if Vance wasn’t already looking the entire time.

“What?”

“There’s um, something I didn’t really tell you?” Rooke says, and then looks directly at him. “Probably should have put it in somewhere, but—”

“Can’t get any worse, out with it,” Dimara urges. At least Rooke doesn’t look as petrified as he does earlier. He casts a glance towards the door and looks back to all of them just as quickly.

“I can’t exactly go outside?”

“Same,” Blair says from the floor, and Celia kicks him.

“No – no, not like I don’t want to go out during the day. I can’t leave the house?”

“You can’t leave the house,” Dimara echoes, looking just as confused as he feels. Of all thousands of things Rooke could have said, Rory definitely wasn’t expecting that.

“You never go outside,” Kelsea says, some sort of realization dawning in her voice. Rory really wishes he had even a single ounce of that inside him right now, because he still doesn’t have the faintest clue, and wishes he did.

“I can’t,” Rooke insists. “I’ve tried. The front door, the back. Every single window. It’s like I hit a wall the second I’m about to cross. Even when I just phase out and try to appear outside, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything.”

“Can I try throwing you out the window?” Blair asks, sounding genuinely curious and then rolls away when Celia tries to kick him again. Rory can only get so far before he starts imagining Rooke slamming into an invisible wall and then knocking them both over.

“Not everything,” Vance points out. “I mean, the internet exists.”

“And books that aren’t a thousand years old,” Dimara mutters. Apparently, the décor has been offending her.

“And us!” Kelsea says. “You’ve never had us before. We’re pretty smart – I think we can figure it out. We can get you outside.”

“You know a magical curse breaker?” Blair asks, into the floor. “’Cause that’s what that sounds like to me.”

“Yes! Well, not know personally, but I know of her. I’ve never talked to her, and I’ve never even really gotten too close to her house because I was scared she would set me on fire with her eyes on something, but—”

“Reassuring,” Celia interrupts.

“How did you know my dream death was getting killed by an eighty year old witch who lives in a woodland shack?” Vance asks.

“She is not eighty years old,” Kelsea says indignantly. “She’s like, the same age as you. But she’s definitely a witch. And she could probably figure it out.”

That’s if she wants to, and from what very little Rory knows of any sort of witches they’re not usually that forthcoming. They probably are more likely to set someone on fire with their eyes, before they offered up their help.

Rory doesn’t think he’d be so willing to offer up his help either, if his kind was on the brink of extinction.

And for all he knows, that’s the path they’ve started heading down.

“Family road trip,” Blair announces. “Your car cannot hold seven people.”

“Six,” Rooke reminds him. “Still can’t go outside.”

Well, everyone seems slightly more optimistic now. Rory feels pretty much the opposite. Dimara said it couldn’t get any worse, but it kind of just did. Not only has Rooke been experiencing almost a complete lack of human contact since 1946, he hasn’t stepped foot outside, and he didn’t have a choice in the matter. He never went out with any of them. Not in the car, not for a walk.

That’s another stupid thing they should have realized, added to the list.

“Alright,” Dimara says, and stands up. It’s pitch black outside, so there’s no way she’s thinking about heading over now. She steps over Blair and stops in front of Rooke instead, holding out her arms.

“Get up and give me a hug.”

Rooke stares at her. Rory is really not surprised by that.

“Either you get up and hug me or this gets really ugly.”

“I could just disappear,” he mutters, but he’s already in the process of standing up, and she pulls him into a hug. It’s odd to think of it like that. He really could just disappear out of her arms right now, but he doesn’t. Rory tries not to stare like he’s experiencing the most interesting spectacle of his entire life, and finally understands why Kelsea’s having such difficulty with it.

Rooke hugs her back with a very worrying intensity, arms nearly shaking. First real hug, excluding Kelsea mauling him earlier, in seventy-two years probably does that to you. Dimara probably wasn’t intending on holding onto him for so long, but she must feel it the same way they can all see it. His hands are digging harshly into her back, face buried in her shoulder like he doesn’t want to come back out.

“We’re gonna figure this out,” she says softly. “Just trust us. We’ll get her to do something, or—”

“Or I’ll threaten to eat her,” Blair says, just this side of too cheery.

“That better be a joke,” Vance says, but the delighted grin on Blair’s face says otherwise. He doesn’t doubt for a second that Blair will start to threaten this girl’s life if she doesn’t want to help them, and that won’t end well.

“Twenty on Blair being the first one to die tomorrow?” Celia asks.

“ _No_ ,” he insists.

“I’ll put twenty in on that,” Vance says.

“That’s my money you’re all using,” Dimara points out. “But twenty.”

Blair looks bored. Boredom for vampires usually isn’t great. They’re all aware that Blair could become the scariest person in this room in roughly half a second, with very little effort.

Absentmindedly, Rory really hopes things just work tomorrow.

He really doesn’t want to be cleaning up a body.

Or multiple.

He’s seen enough bodies to last a lifetime.


	7. What Happened In The Past

Blair has never regretted being stuffed into a car more in his entire life.

He feels like a sardine. A very squished sardine.

“Can you please purchase like, a soccer mom van?” he asks, the second he shoves himself into the backseat, and is met with a very dirty look from Dimara. Celia smirks at him from the passenger seat.

“How did the three tallest people in the car get shoved into the back?” Vance asks, which is also a fair point. Ignoring the fact that Kelsea was literally forced to sit in the space between Celia’s legs because there’s nowhere else for her to go.

“We should’ve just ran.”

“Not happening,” Rory says.

“I didn’t mean _you_.” He could be wherever they’re going in a minute, if he knew which direction to head. Vance in maybe five. Everyone else would take hours, but their speed is unmatchable, at this point. And it really would be ten times better than being stuck in a car for however long this is going to take.

He feels oddly terrible, leaving Rooke behind at the house when this is entirely about him, but they literally don’t have a choice in the matter. They’re basically the ambassadors for him, who are going to show up at a stranger’s house and probably wind up groveling and pleading on their knees for her to help.

Or at least someone is. He definitely does not plan on doing that.

If they ever get there, that is. They’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere. He didn’t think that phrase could get any more applicable than it does when you’re talking about the house. You can’t see anything from there. Granted, Kelsea’s pretty much spent the entirety of her life in the middle of nowhere, so this can’t seem like a big deal to her.

But the woods are darker, the further away you get from the ocean. Darker usually means bad; it means that things can hide themselves easier, only found when they want to be.

There’s no way a teenager has any business living out here on her own.

Then again, what reason is there for Blair to be back up here? He’s been wandering New England for nearly two years now, for no reason at all other than boredom. Boredom seems to be the driving force behind him most days, now.

But there’s nothing here. Nothing keeping him here.

None that he knows of anyway.

They miss the turn-off four times. It’s a lot like their house, even though he abhors the fact that he’s already considering it his house. If you drive too fast you wouldn’t even know there was a place to pull off the road in the first place. It doesn’t help that Kelsea’s never approached it from this way – she always came crawling out of the woods to spy, not from the road. It’s not like any of them can really blame her, when they wind up driving in circles for nearly twenty minutes trying to find it over and over again.

It doesn’t get any better once they do turn off, either. It seemed like a driveway, that turns out to be more of an actual road. It continues on and on for what seems like forever, the canopy growing thicker and thicker, nearly obscuring the sky from view.

Celia looks up out of the sunroof, and her eyes narrow.

“I don’t like this,” Rory says, which he didn’t have to say out-loud. Vance rolls down the window and leans halfway out of it. Blair can’t help but wonder if that’s just an inherent dog thing, which doesn’t even really make sense, but it’s not like he would know. It’s not like he’s made a point to spend very much time around werewolves in his life.

Until now, anyway.

It’s either him or Vance that will smell something coming, but there’s nothing. Just the trees and the stale water flooded at the edges of the dirt road, even though it hasn’t rained recently. The blur of every little creature that lives around here melded into one thing. If there was a smell that could tell you to keep away, that would be it.

They’re down the road for at least ten minutes before they see any signs of life. The trees open up a bit, enough to expose weak sunlight from above that has only half-begun to dry the road. There are tire tracks through the mud – a bike, or a motorcycle. Something of the sort. Still no sign of any people, which Blair isn’t all that surprised by. Even he wouldn’t be living so far out here, though.

But if Kelsea’s right, and this is a witch, it makes sense.

A small wooden cabin appears in the clearing up ahead and to their right. Maybe cabin’s not the right word; Vance seems to be more on-point with his previous description of shack.

But at least there’s something alive about it. All the grass and weeds are growing up tall and wild, nearly lost in the shadows of the house. A light from inside, pouring out the only front window into the grass below.

It’s still very dark.

“This isn’t ominous at all,” Celia deadpans, and Kelsea scrambles up between her legs to get a better look.

“It’s really not, I swear. She seems nice.”

“Nice because you’ve never gotten close to her,” he insists. “She probably _could_ set you on fire with her eyes.”

He pops open the door and steps into the grass, if only because his legs can’t take another minute of being cramped up behind Dimara’s seat. That’s probably not the truth, but that’s the issue with witches. They’re all different. They can never do the same things. Some hardly have any powers at all, and some could raze entire cities to the ground with a flick of their wrist.

They’re troublesome.

It’s no wonder most of them have been killed off, the past two hundred years.

Blair can’t imagine whoever this is is going to be very welcoming. Six strangers show up your doorstep asking for help – that’s asking for trouble. Something he’s clearly become very good at, with so many years of practice.

“Let me talk,” Dimara insists, and then shoulders him out of the way when he raises his fist to knock. He nearly knocks Rory over, which seems kind of counter-productive. They’re all kind of tense as is, worried and unsure of how this is all going to go. Of all the numerous things he’s dealt with, this has never been one of them.

The door pops open before Dimara even steps forward.

Blair isn’t really sure what he was expecting; for Kelsea to have been lying, maybe, about this girl being Vance’s age. But that’s exactly what she appears to be. Like she should be in high school, maybe a bit older. She certainly looks about as unimpressed and annoyed as any given teenager would be.

“That was creepy,” Vance mutters.

“Says one of the six people who just showed up uninvited to my front door,” she quips back. “Thought there would be seven of you.”

They all pause. _Six_ , Rooke had said _. Still can’t go outside_.

“That’s the trouble with seeing the future,” she continues. “Never perfect, much to my utter fucking dismay.”

“You can see the future?” Celia asks.

She shrugs. “Sometimes. Is that why you’re here?”

Blair is not at all easily creeped out, but he has to admit Vance is right.

“Not exactly,” Dimara says. “It’s about something else, and we thought you could—”

“How’d you know I was here?”

All of them near simultaneously cast a very suspicious looking glance at Kelsea, who takes a massive step behind him in an attempt to hide. It still doesn’t stop the girl from seeing her, but she just as quickly glances away and to the woods.

“Are all fairies this inherently nosy?”

Kelsea’s face scrunches up, but she doesn’t really deny it. The girl looks away from the trees and then back to _him_ , finally, and she smirks. The true reason why no one likes witches – they make the hair on the back of your neck stand up with one look, friend or not.

“You’re not coming in,” she says. “But everyone else can.”

“Excuse me?” he manages, trying to comprehend the fact that she’s both actively acknowledging what he is while denying him entry at the exact same time. It doesn’t help that Dimara skirts around her into the cabin instantly, Celia on her heels, because they’re not about to lose this opportunity. It still doesn’t help the fact that _he’s stuck outside_.

“I’ll keep the door open,” she says, like that’s some sort of grand offer. “You got any money?”

“Why?” he asks. “If I pay you will you let me in?”

“No. But if I agree to help you with your problem I want adequate payment.”

He is absolutely, one hundred and fifty percent being spoken to by a teenager right now. No one else would have the balls. Rory casts him a final guilty glance and then slips into the cabin after everyone else, leaving him trapped outside, an armlength away from a certain girl he would probably be strangling right now, if he had the option to.

The worst part is, he can pay her. He’s got more than enough money. So what, if he’s been leeching off Dimara the past little while.

“Stay by the door,” he insists. “And I’ll pay you more.”

“Deal,” she agrees. No one else has gone very far anyway, lingering just inside the doorway. There’s not much to the place. From what he can see just a little kitchen, a set of table and chairs, a few old musty couches, one topped with a pile of unfolded blankets. There must be a back area to it – a bedroom, and a bathroom, but not much else.

And there’s just a random teenage witch living in it. No big deal, or anything.

To her credit, she doesn’t look like this is bothering her at all. Maybe she could do something to them that they’re all unaware of, and he’d be powerless to stop it. Vance can’t control the shift, and Kelsea and Rory wouldn’t hurt her in the first place. To his knowledge, Dimara and Celia don’t have any weapons on them, but he didn’t bother asking.

Someone should have been more prepared for this.

She pulls one of the chairs out from the table and sits down on it backwards, draping her arms over the top of it. “So. What’s your issue?”

“Um,” Dimara starts. “We have this— we have this friend. And he’s sort of stuck and unable to get out of a house.”

“Geez, what’d you guys do?”

“We didn’t _do_ anything. It’s been that way for a long time, longer than any of us have known him. We just now found out, and we’re looking for a way to get him out. If a way even exists. But if anyone could think of something, we reckon it would be you.”

“Probably should’ve started with the fact that he’s dead,” he interrupts.

“Undead?”

“No. Literally dead. As in Casper the fucking Ghost was haunting the house and I was the only one aware of it, apparently.”

“For how long.”

“1946.”

She whistles, but still looks puzzled. “And you can all see him?”

“Should we not be able to?” Celia questions.

“Not usually. Most angels would be able – seers or witches, too. Sometimes it’s just a random occurrence. But if you can all see him that probably means _everyone_ can. And that’s not normal.”

That just makes this whole situation even better, doesn’t it? As if Rooke’s situation wasn’t odd enough, now his weird and unnatural abilities have become even weirder. Blair has to admit, even he was startled by how undeniably human he actually looks. He’s seen a handful of ghosts in his time, but most of them are warped. Maybe by time, or just the unbroken wind.

But Rooke looks like nothing ever happened, in the right light.

It’s no wonder that only he noticed.

“How’d he die?” she asks.

“Well,” Dimara starts, and that’s the only word she gets out before Blair hears something, a ways off down the drive. Even he doesn’t know the answer to that particular question, so he wasn’t sure what exactly she was about to say, but the noise consumes everything else, and Vance hears it too.

It’s a rumbling sound, an engine going at near full blast, even and smooth.

He looks to Kelsea. “Who else lives here?”

“I didn’t know anyone else lived here?” she says, clearly perplexed, but the witch looks honest to god amused. It’s better than concerned, because for all his talk he really wasn’t prepared to get into an outright fistfight today, but he almost doesn’t like that any better.

He thinks of the tire tracks coming up through the mud. There’s no other car here, no way out.

Not unless someone’s taking her out.

He starts heading away from the house and back down through the grass, and Vance follows not two seconds later. Dimara calls after them both. He stops right behind the car, blocking the rest of the drive.

“What is that?” Vance asks. “Motorbike?”

“Sounds like it,” he replies. One person, then. Two at the very most. He should have questioned it sooner. His senses are better than this. He can smell another person here, now that he’s focusing on it. Something that’s not just witch.

But the most infuriating part is that he doesn’t know what it is.

It is a motorbike. It appears around the last bend, nearly deafening now, and comes to a blindingly fast halt at the sight of the two of them, spraying mud and water out from it’s back tire and into the brush.

The bike stops two feet away from him. It’s a girl, at least, but that’s about all he can tell. Both her legs come to rest on the ground, but she otherwise doesn’t move, not even for the helmet that’s still concealing her face.

She stays there for what feels like forever, and even though he can’t see her face, he’s getting the feeling he’s being stared at.

He’s gotten really used to that feeling.

It’s a solid thirty seconds before she moves again, and she swings herself off the bike and pulls the helmet off at nearly the same time. She’s more normal looking than what we would have expected, for how long it took her to pull the helmet off. At the rate she was going he was expecting to come face to face with a full-on goblin.

“Tanis!” she calls, and two seconds later the witch pops her head out the door, smiling like a fiend.

“Yeah, I’m good, Nadir. Not dead or anything.”

He really does not like this. That has to be saying something. Nadir takes a very large breath, still staring towards the house, and then looks back at the two of them. She stares again for a very long moment before she sighs, and then starts rolling the bike up to the side of the house.

“Jesus Christ,” she mutters, more to herself than anyone else, but he still hears it clear as day.

“What the fuck are you?” he asks after her, and she doesn’t even lift her head back up, focused on her task.

“You don’t know?” Vance asks

“Not a clue,” he says, and there’s no way Vance knows either, not when he’s still getting used to all of this. She’s not human, that’s for sure, but whatever she is is not something he’s ever come across in his life, and that’s more worrying than knowing.

She doesn’t look back at them when she finally brings the bike to a halt and makes a beeline directly for the front door. He almost hurries to follow, until he remembers that there’s no point.

“Sorry,” Vance mutters, and makes haste for the door himself, which once again leaves Blair standing outside with absolutely zero clue of what’s going on. He stares down the road and then back up towards the bike, nearly hidden in the tall grass.

It feels like there’s a pit opening up in his stomach, something he can’t explain—

“Blair!” Dimara yells, and he’s back up at the door instantly, still on the outside looking in. At least they still have the numbers in all of this.

That’s what he’s hoping, anyway, but an unknown can bring more factors into this than he even knows how to deal with.

Tanis is back in her chair, looking pretty relaxed about it. Nadir has disappeared, somewhere in the back of the house, but she comes back out now sans jacket and props herself up on the edge of the couch.

“You shouldn’t invite people in when I’m not here.”

“Well, I didn’t invite everyone in,” she says, with a pointed glance towards him, and he glares at her.

“Because inviting five people in as opposed to six really makes all of this better,” Nadir responds. She’s getting a good look at all of them now, for the first time, trying to make sense of what she’s looking at. He doesn’t know what separates the species, between who can tell and who can’t. Tanis can clearly figure it out, for the most part, but it doesn’t look as if she can.

He knows he can, and Vance _will_ be able to, once he’s got more of this sorted out. Everyone else just kind of leaves it up to chance and hopes for the best, which is why they’re here in the first place. Rooke should have just been an obvious thing, a sense of wrongness throughout the house, the feeling of something frigid and icy just beyond your shoulder, the numbness of his fingers. But no one else notices that stuff.

It’s just him.

They’re a mess of creatures, if not anything else.

That’s why it’s so infuriating, that Nadir has turned into one giant, maddening question mark in his head.

And she’s looking at him like she knows it, too.

“You can continue,” Tanis offers.

“Who is she?” Dimara asks instead.

“My— roommate?”

“Protector,” he guesses instead, and that’s when both of them suddenly shift from genuinely curious to defensive, and you wouldn’t even have to be supernatural to notice the difference. Which means he’s right. The pile of blankets on the couch, the dilapidated state of the entire little place – it wasn’t meant for two people.

But it is now. And they’re both looking directly at him.

He has no plans on getting his ass handed by him to something he doesn’t even know exists, but if she keeps looking at him like that, it’s going to happen.

“I could kill you,” Tanis says, easy as pie.

“I’d get there first,” he says, which is the truth. Tanis probably could kill him, no way she’s bluffing about it in a room full of strangers. But no one’s as quick as he is. He could snap her neck and flee before anyone even saw him do it.

“Not while you’re stuck out there,” she says, amused.

If everyone could stop making shitty points against him, he’d be grateful.

“Can we just talk about Rooke?” Kelsea pleads. “This isn’t about anyone fighting. I just want to get him out of the house.”

“We _all_ want him out of the house,” Rory emphasizes. “So we need your help.”

“He can pay you, I’ll pay you,” Dimara offers. “If we can give you all the details, do you think you could figure out how?”

“What exactly are the details?” Nadir asks quietly. And thus begins the very lengthy process of repeating everything they had already told Tanis, and then beginning to go through the newer bits. It leads to Dimara having to spill the beans about what exactly happened to the kid in the first place, and Blair would be more focused on it if it didn’t look like Kelsea was closer to crying in a stranger’s house by the very second. He gets it. Hearing all of this for the first time isn’t that easy, especially to someone who was so convinced things like this just didn’t happen in the outside world.

Listen, he was killed too. Probably very gruesomely, covered in blood, by some very hungry passing vampire who thought he was an easy target.

He may not remember it, but he knows he wasn’t strung up the same way he knows that everything will get better, if they just get Rooke out of the damn house. Or maybe that’s just everyone else’s stupid optimism rubbing off on him, because he’s never had that before.

Rooke had it worse than him. He still does.

He never thought he’d say that about someone in his entire life.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Tanis says eventually. “I have no idea how the fuck to do this. Most people just ask me to make potions or try and get them a vision or something else that takes up an hour of my time. Could I figure it out? Maybe. But there’s no guarantee.”

“But you’ll try?”

“Yeah, I’ll try. I’ll need to see him, though. And the house.”

“Okay,” Dimara says. “We can do that. We might need a bit of time to convince him, but—”

“More than a bit,” Celia says under her breath, and Blair thinks she’s right. Rooke’s not going to take lightly to at least one person, probably two, showing up at the house and invading his personal space like it’s their right. If Tanis is coming, Nadir is too. He already knows that without asking.

“Do you all live there?” Tanis asks, and despite the previous snark there’s a small bit of wonder in her voice.

Probably for how they’re all still alive.

Dimara glances around at each of them in silence. There’s never really been any discussion about this. Three of them got quite literally dragged or carried in, conscious or not. He never planned on staying more than the night, and still isn’t sure why he’s not feeling the usual urge to leave. Kelsea found them and decided she didn’t want to leave, which was somehow the least surprising part of everything that was happening at the time.

And Dimara, well. She’s in too deep to escape them now. There’s no picking back up and moving to Portland, not after everything she’s seen.

“Yeah, we do,” she says quietly, and no one pipes up in refusal. Even he doesn’t find a retort rising up.

He’s been wandering for a long time. It’s kind of nice, not to have that obligation.

“Well, you work on your ghost,” Tanis says. “And you can call me when he agrees to it, or I’ll call you when I think I figure something out. But just know that magic fucks with things. It’s not natural, obviously. Clearly something’s keeping him in the house, and if we get rid of whatever that is, then it gets tricky. There’s always a price to pay, when you do things like this. All magic has a cost to it.”

“Like what?”

“No way to tell before you do it. But believe me, if it happens – _when_ it happens, you’ll know.”

God, will no one quit it with the ominous dramatics? Try telling that to Rooke, who’s been stuck in the same house since the 40’s. He probably won’t care what cost there is.

“Well, thank you,” Dimara says. “I mean that. We all mean that, and I’m sure he will too, if you can figure this out.”

Blair lets his attention fade off, when they’re exchanging numbers. It took longer than he thought it would, to explain everything, but not as much time as he thought to convince Tanis to help them. It’s clearly not just the payment – she gets some sort of fulfillment out of doing these things.

You have to do what your blood calls you to do.

And to be honest, he’s pretty hungry at the moment.

Not the thing to say here, though, and he’s perfectly aware of that. He stays outside and bounces on the balls of his feet until the others eventually trickle outside. They’re all talking, not quietly enough that he can’t hear, but not loud enough that he’s concerned, either. He meanders back to the car while the rest of them huddle around the front door for another minute longer, and then stays there while everyone else clambers in.

“You really think this will work?” Kelsea asks, crawling past him into the backseat. He has absolutely zero idea where she plans on sitting, once he’s in there. On top of one of them, presumably.

He’s about to follow her in and shove her out of the way when a hand lands on his arm, and it startles him.

He hadn’t been listening to the footsteps, not like usual, and Nadir appears right behind him and grabs at his arm like she’s pretty well-practiced at doing it. She’s fiddling with her necklace with the other hand, golden cross rolled over and over again between her fingers, but it’s the heat of her hand against his bare forearm that’s really concerning.

He knows he’s cold – perks of being a literal undead.

But that’s something else. That’s not natural.

“You need to be careful,” she says. “Bad things happen when vampires go loose.”

He shakes her off, and sits down on the edge of the seat, shoving the others out of the way. She may have let go easily, but she still hasn’t moved.

“I know,” he replies.

“So do I. You need to be careful.”

There’s years worth of stories behind that one simple sentence, but everyone’s got those. Everyone’s got things no one else knows about – that’s just how the world works. Unfortunately for him his involved being killed and then raised, doomed to never die unless someone feels bored enough to decapitate him one day, or rip his not-beating heart out of his chest.

He’s felt that way, more than once. Hopeful that someone would be bored enough to.

But the feeling’s passed, now.

He doesn’t mind being alive.

“No promises,” he says at long last, and reaches for the door. She slams it shut before he can even get there, and the entire frame of the car shakes as it happens. Nadir doesn’t step out of the way when Dimara turns the engine over, or when she starts to move. They could hit her right now.

Kill her, possibly, but he’s not so sure of that anymore.

They turn off, out of the clearing. Nadir stands there watching them go until the very last bend. The tires bump and roll over every single pothole in the road, and normally he’d have looked away by now, but he doesn’t.

They round the bend, trees and branches blurring across his vision, and then they’re both gone.

—

—

—

His arm burns the entire way home.

He stares for a very long while, but it lessens and lessens to the point where he’s able to shove it into the background. He pretty much has to. He thought the hunger was half a joke, produced by some amount of boredom, but it’s not.

And when you cram him into such proximity with five other people, it becomes more obvious than normal.

He can’t remember the last time he ate. Before he first showed up at the house, at least. Issue is he has no idea how long it’s been, since that day. Not even two weeks, probably, but it was a few days before he showed up too.

Two weeks isn’t that bad. He can go longer than that. He _has g_ one longer than that. It doesn’t start getting really bad until about a month, and the days leading up to it are filled with nothing but the thought of killing someone, of splattering their blood all over the place, and there’s no saving them from that. There’s no thought to keeping a victim alive, when you’re in the midst of something like that.

So he could go longer, than what he has right now. But that doesn’t mean he wants to, or has to. It all goes downhill from here – the irritation, the anger, the bloodlust. Sue him for not wanting the desire to attack someone in this car to be a permanent thing. He doesn’t actually want that.

Apparently, he’s getting soft. He wouldn’t have thought twice about it a hundred years ago. In fact, he’d probably kill all of them just to get a kick out of his day and leave them all lying alongside the road for some poor innocent farmer to find.

Not that he’s done that, or anything.

It just makes sense, that he’s thinking all this and Dimara decides now is the prime opportunity to drive around in circles talking with everybody. Through the trees, out along the coast, and Rory leans around him a bit to get a good look at the ocean even with Kelsea practically sitting on him, which can’t be easy.

There’s nothing about sitting in this car that’s easy.

He gets it – it’s better to talk all this through before they get back, before Rooke has to hear it. They want to get all their doubt and confusion out now, before they have to look him in the eye and explain what they so hope is going to work.

But Dimara’s stopped at a red light, and now she’s talking about getting food.

If only she knew what he had been thinking, the past twenty minutes. Has it really been that long, that he’s been tuned out?

It could be longer. It could have been thirty seconds. All he knows is that the sound of the turn signal is starting to irritate him, which is great, and the fact is if she’s turning that means she definitely is not headed anywhere in the direction he wants them to.

“Can we go back to the house?” he asks. His voice is surprisingly even. That doesn’t stop literally everyone in the car from looking at him, because this is the first time he’s spoken since they all got back in.

There’s a lot of varying expressions in the mix.

The light turns green. Dimara’s still looking at him.

“Or, you know, you could just let me out here, if you would take the child locks off.”

Someone honks behind them. There’s no way anyone in this lane is taking advantage of the arrow, at this point.

She reaches to the side, and from this angle he’s almost certain she’s about to unlock the door and just let him off in the middle of the street. No way someone’s not running him down, with the number of angry drivers there happen to be in this area.

The turn signal clicks, and Dimara pulls into the next lane.

She also nearly gets them rear-ended, swearing up a storm the whole time, but Blair lets his head thump against the window, relieved. Someone reaches over to squeeze his hand – Kelsea, he’s sure, but he’s more comforted by the fact that they’re turning onto a highly recognizable road, one that leads to the main drive of the house.

It’s not that he’s ungrateful for this; it’s the opposite, rather. Most people wouldn’t have let him in the house in the first place, and if they had it would only be to attempt to kill him a few days later, once he let his guard down. Everyone’s still looking at him now, even if it’s just out of their corner of their eyes, but no one looks as if they’re about to tuck and roll out of the car in their haste to get away from him and his problems.

Most people would. That’s the smart thing to do.

He’s really glad, for the concrete proof that no one in this car is very intelligent after all.

Dimara starts up the drive and the house filters in through the trees. No doubt Rooke will be waiting to see what happened, but he’s not going to be around for that part of the explanation.

The car stops, just in front of the steps. He can see Rooke, flitting in around the front window, watching them all. Vance leans around Rory to look at him, and then after a moment gets out of the car, pulling Kelsea after him. It doesn’t take long for Rory to follow. Celia glances between him and Dimara in silence, before she sighs, and then slips out as well, slamming the door shut.

He doesn’t like this – this feeling of being watched. It’s a problem he’s had for as long as he can remember.

Dimara looks at him. “What do you want me to do?”

“Leave me the keys.”

She takes her hand off of them, leaving them dangling in the ignition. “If you crash my car—”

“I won’t crash your car,” he promises, trying not to sound too eager at the prospect of her finally getting out.

“I’m serious,” she insists. “Don’t crash my car. Don’t get blood in my car. Don’t do anything weird with my car. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and find out that I’m implicated in a crime.”

“Won’t be gone that long.”

“How long, then?”

“Few hours. I’ll be back before midnight.”

That seems to relax her a bit. Not like he’s about to go missing again or anything, but now he’s fully committed to coming back to the house sometime in the next few hours. He wasn’t aware that she really gave a shit, whether he came back or not.

She gets out of the driver’s seat, and he scrambles over the console and drops himself in her place. Even a split second glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror confirms that his eyes are looking a tad more fucked up than they usually do.

“Be careful,” Dimara says, and then shuts the door.

Celia re-opens the passenger side door and gets back in.

He goes still, his foot hovering an inch above the gas pedal. He hadn’t even noticed she was still standing there. Or did she come running back out of the house? Regardless, he wasn’t aware of it. She puts her seatbelt back on and then looks out the front window, glancing over at him when he doesn’t even begin to move.

“What?”

“Who said you were invited?” he asks her.

“Rich, coming from you.”

A fair enough point. Does everyone get kicks from pointing that out? First a virtual stranger, and now Celia?

“I’m coming with you,” she continues. “As supervision. Gonna make sure you don’t kill too many people.”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” he says, with an irritated sigh. “Haven’t actually done that in a while. Your faith is astounding. And what, you’d let me kill a few people but not half a dozen? Some kind of angel you are.”

She shrugs, and he rolls his eyes. Of all the people he would suspect would not be in support of this, an angel would probably be first on the list. Half the time he can’t help but wonder if Celia’s lying about all of this. He really would believe it, if she didn’t have those scars on her back.

“Fine,” she says. “I am extremely proud of you. You seriously don’t kill people?”

“Most of the time,” he mutters, and starts the car. She’s seriously not getting out, and he’s not in the mood to shove her out into the driveway.

“So, what? Every two weeks you just go wandering around until you find someone that looks good enough on the street, and then _most of the time_ you don’t kill them?”

He doesn’t have to. Most of the time it’s easy enough to take what you need and then stop, if you’re not too far past the point of gone. Pop a little bit of your own blood back into their system and in a few minutes they’re healed, dazed and confused. Most of them have barely a recollection that it ever happened. Provided they don’t die at some point with vampire blood in their system and come back as one, it’s usually not a problem. Usually.

The fact of the matter is, animal blood doesn’t do shit. You learn that the hard way.

“Should do it more often than two weeks,” is all he says, and she looks out the window, almost thoughtfully.

He stops at the end of the drive, feeling too on edge. The cars are whizzing by at a breakneck speed, headlights beginning to flicker on the darker it gets.

“Go left,” Celia says suddenly.

“Why?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

Left is back to Portland, back to a place he absolutely does not have a single desire to be in right now. More things to watch out for, more blood running.

A break in the cars opens up, more than enough for him to turn off, but he doesn’t. “Why the hell did you get kicked out of heaven?”

Celia continues tapping her fingers alongside the edge of the window, still looking very thoughtful. After a moment she turns to him and smiles. It’s less a smile than it is a knife, and angels may be believed to be innocent and gracious and fulfilling, but they’re also very dangerous, if you happen to cross them.

“Wanna go find out?”

Does he? He doesn’t have a choice. The issue is, Celia’s no more of a maniac, or at least planning to be, than he already is.

What more could go wrong, that what already has?

He glances up and down the road and turns left. “Am I going to regret this?”

She doesn’t answer. For some reason, the lack of words is more an answer than anything else that could possibly come out of her mouth.

It’s nearing dark, the sun about to go down any minute, and Celia rolls the window down, wind buffeting over the both of them. Being exposed to the open sky and the wind – angel thing. Like he said, they all have their things.

He’s not sure there’s one in particular that extends to everyone, though. He’s never met anyone who feels the same way he does, more days than not.

He can drive or run all he wants, pick any direction – but that feeling of being watched, of being followed?

It never goes away.


	8. Ghost Towns

Someone robbed the blood bank last night.

Tanis cannot say she is surprised by that in the slightest.

It’s one of the very first things that pops up on the homepage of her laptop, somewhere between four and five in the morning, when she finds she can’t sleep. You wouldn’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that it was a vampire, or something of the sort, but you’d have to be pretty particular to know which one, among the hundreds of thousands that exists.

Tanis, thankfully, is always pretty particular.

That, or peculiar. The words get mixed up quite a lot, when people are thinking about her.

She knows why she can’t sleep. She’s never had something like this to deal with before, never had people coming to her for help with something so monumental. He may be dead, but this is essentially someone’s life at stake. If she doesn’t fix it, chances are no one’s going to.

Just because she’s hiding out here doesn’t mean she could accept being stuck inside the same house since the 1940’s. She still has the luxury of going outside, and going into town, and visiting her parents. Maybe she does it less than she’d like to, or than she would if she were a normal blooded teenager, but life doesn’t usually work the way you want it to.

Right now, she doesn’t have any particular desire to leave the house.

She doesn’t ever go back to sleep. It’s something that’s sporadic most days, if she ever finds it at all. Usually it’s because of something that’s troubling her, something that she’s yet to figure out.

But it’s never been something with the potential to be this complicated.

This life altering.

Her laptop doesn’t have the answers for it, either. The sun slowly rises in the background while she lays in bed with it propped up next to her, googling the most nonsensical things she can think of.

Funny – you’d think of all things, Wikipedia would have an answer for this.

She can’t help but wonder if anyone’s ever done this. A regular old person trapped somewhere, specifically a building, that’s one thing. But someone who’s been dead as long as this person has? Any other ghost would be able to phase out and cross the boundary, re-appearing back outside, but he clearly can’t.

If he could, that ragtag group wouldn’t have shown up here in the first place.

Damn fairies and their creepy intuition paired with a heavy side of nosiness. Of _course_ that’s not something the future would show her – that there was a little girl off in the woods spying on her when her back was turned.

Probably not so much of a little girl as said little girl wants her to believe.

That group though; they’re something else. All something different, yet close as can be. Even standing in this house they were trying to keep distance between themselves, trying not to look so united and imposing, but it’s obvious. All she’s been taught ever since the magic made an appearance was to hide herself away, never show anyone, never do anything to raise suspicion.

And here they all are, showing up like they think they own the place. No worry, no fear.

It’s almost kind of envious.

She’s never going to have that, and she’s not under any delusions. Not unless she wants to wind up dead six months after the fact. There’s no group in the world that would probably risk the wrath she could bring down upon them. Other species. Hunters. Random people who panic and stab her if she happens to look at them the wrong way.

That’s supposedly happened. More than once.

She doesn’t really want to experience it first-hand, just because of what she is.

Truth be told, she’s lucky she has someone at all. Tanis has known what she was for a long time, but it didn’t get really bad until a few years back. She was freshly sixteen, three days into a job that definitely was not going to support her on her own, but she had to try, for her parent’s sake. Put some distance between them before anything bad happened.

That’s when the news had broken – about the coven in Augusta. Thirty-seven of them, male and female alike. Six children under the age of twelve. An entire group slaughtered and ripped apart by a group of hunters. She had been standing behind the counter of a too-old coffee shop, hands locked around a tray, when the television had started playing it. The same news reporter, over and over. He had looked so monotone, so expressionless, for the amount of caution tape that was rippling in the wind behind him.

Her hands were shaking. Shaking so hard she could feel the flimsy plastic tray about to splinter apart between her hands.

She wasn’t sure if she was having a panic attack, or if she was just truly terrified.

She had thought it was one of her coworkers that grabbed her, because she hadn’t bothered looking. She was too busy trying to pull everything back, trying to stop herself from doing whatever it was her body was planning on doing. She had felt sick – beyond sick. Like everything was about to come up, the good and the bad.

If there was any good left in her.

She remembers the bathroom door opening, and then the lock of the stall turning when she was pushed down onto the closed seat, before someone completely unfamiliar had crouched down in front of her.

That had pushed through the haze, the sight of an unfamiliar face in a space that was too small, and she had felt the explosion ready to happen, until Nadir had grabbed both of her hands and told her to calm down. To breathe.

Her phone had been ringing, over and over again. Her mom. Her concern, her fear – it was all justified. Her parents felt it for her too. They were worried that they’d come home one day to find a dead body, already cooling, from whatever had decided to finally come after her.

She had sat in that stall for an hour with Nadir holding onto her, feeling like her lungs were closing up. She doesn’t remember any of the conversation with her mom, when she finally managed to call.

She remembers getting fired, very vividly.

It’s kind of hard to forget getting fired from your very first job, three days in.

There was no spoken agreement between them. She’s not sure when she found the house, but she knows Nadir disappeared for a while before she came back, seemingly for good. Her parents felt better about letting her take off when she had someone to look after her.

She hadn’t known, at the time. That Nadir _could_ look after her.

But there’s no secrets between them anymore.

“Hey,” Nadir says, and cracks open her door. By the looks of it, she’s knocked more than once. “How long have you been awake?”

She looks down at her laptop, dead-set on finding the time, but it’s asleep, and she frantically moves the mouse. “A while?”

She’s also apparently been zoned out a while, too.

“Freaks me out when you go all blank like that, reminds me of when you’re scrying,” Nadir says. “Want breakfast?”

Variations aside, Tanis is feeling like she’s heard that exact sentence way too many times in her life. The zoning out has always been a thing, though. She thinks it just got worse, with the addition of the magic. To think she didn’t pop out of her own head to the smell of bacon cooking. It’s about the most outrageous thing she’s never thought.

She always hears Nadir get up, too. A product of the fact that this house is no bigger than a shoebox. The hot water only works half the time. The wifi only goes so strong because she spends most of the money her parents have given her on it. She has to rely on Nadir to do everything else, basically, including risking her ass if something ever comes after them.

She wanders out into the kitchen, laptop tucked under her arm, and sets it on the table to resume her search. Not that it’s been going well thus far.

“You look frustrated,” Nadir says.

“Because I am,” she responds. “You’re telling me not one person since the invention of the internet has done this? Not a single one?”

“Someone’s gotta be the first,” Nadir points out. “Who knows, maybe it’ll be you writing the weirdly informative Reddit post this time around.”

Provided she actually figures it out, she very bitterly reminds herself. She’d have to actually get somewhere with concrete results in order to brag about it online, and even then, few people would actually believe her.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Nadir says. “If you need any help, just let me know.”

“Oh of course, you’d offer help _now_ ,” she mutters, too loud. Nadir turns around from the stove and looks at her. She looks back, over the top of her laptop. The amount of staring matches they’ve had over every single topic in the universe is probably inappropriate.

“Someone broke into the blood bank last night,” she says, a second before Nadir can very dumbly ask her what she’s going on about. Tanis is about two seconds away from being perfectly certain she’s getting a spatula thrown at her.

Nadir puts the spatula down and picks up her mug of coffee instead. Stares at her over the brim of it before she puts it back down, resuming her task of probably burning the bacon.

“That’s interesting.”

“I’m sure it is,” Tanis says evenly, going back to flicking through her at least seven open tabs while Nadir glares at her.

She’s really about to resort to Reddit for help.

A new low, in her life.

“I think I might go out for a little drive, but you can come if you want,” Nadir offers. She looks up, in the middle of weighing the merits about if ask.com will really be of any help to her.

“I’m just messing with you. You know that, right?” she asks.

“Yeah,” she replies, and sets down a plate full of bacon and eggs in front of her. “Still just want some time to think, though.”

That’s Nadir code for she’d preferably take her time alone but won’t deny Tanis if she wants to come. She hasn’t really left the house, or at least gone anywhere near the main road, in almost a week at this point. How weird it was aside, actually having some human, or almost, interaction yesterday was kind of nice.

But Nadir needs to think. Probably on her own.

Tanis knows all about that.

“I’ll stay here. If I think of anything I need, I’ll just text you.”

Tanis doesn’t miss the way Nadir smiles, a little gratefully, trying and failing to hide it by a piece of extremely warped bacon. It’s a good thing they get each other. They both went too long without having that in their lives.

And to be honest, Tanis is grateful herself, for having someone that finally matches her in the issues department. In fact, she might say Nadir is worse.

No, not maybe. Nadir is definitely worse. She finishes her breakfast before Tanis even gets through the bacon, still too focused on scrolling to see if she can find anything at all. She’s changed and has a jacket on in what feels like two seconds, and she makes sure to shove Tanis in the shoulder as she heads for the front door, before she can get up and retaliate.

“Lock the door!” she yells, and slams the door behind her.

Lock the door, along with the unspoken _don’t open it for anymore strangers_.

To be honest, she knows Nadir needs her time, but she thinks she needs some too. She can’t stop thinking about what Nadir said – how her zoning out reminds her of when she’s scrying.

She hasn’t done it in a while. It really does freak her out. There’s still the possibility that she could go under and not resurface. She could be stuck in the place between the future and reality, wandering in circles, if someone doesn’t pull her back. If she doesn’t have the strength to do it herself.

It’s never happened, but there really is a first for everything.

A lot of things could happen, if she goes under. She could see something from the future. Something from the past. Possibly even just the brief flash of an idea, something to help her.

It could be worth it, in the long run.

She gets up and locks the door, even though she doesn’t really care to. She rummages around through the kitchen drawers until she finds a handful of taper candles, unaware of when either of them had purchased ones that were bright blue. But they were unused, which is what she needed, and she has no trouble finding candlesticks to hold them up, along with a lighter.

She grabs a large, very old mixing bowl out of the cupboard and fidgets in front of the sink while it fills, and then sets it down on the table. The laptop gets shoved out of the way, and she closes it on whatever useless, open page she had last dared to look at.

The water goes still, save for the faint flicker of the candlelight in it’s reflection, and she lets herself, and her eyes, lose focus.

Scrying is never the same way twice. Sometimes it takes thirty seconds for her to go under, sometimes several minutes. But this time it happens almost instantaneously, and it’s like closing her eyes and waiting for sleep. Waiting to dream.

She blinks, and she’s standing in the street.

It’s empty. Of people, anyway. It’s part of Portland’s downtown, the street eerily quiet. The sky is dark and gray, the clouds appearing very pissed off, and even though the rain is coming down from the sky in sheets she doesn’t feel any of it. Her clothes are soaked through, her hair plastered to her skull, and she can hear it. But if she couldn’t, she’d believe even it was fake, too.

It technically is. None of this is real.

Not yet, anyway.

The emptiness becomes more alarming, the longer she dares herself to look. The cars are all haphazardly parked along the curb, some edged up onto the sidewalk and into the flowerbeds. The storefront window to her right is smashed in, glass all over the cobblestone entryway. Even the chairs just inside are knocked over, a spill of a freshly served drink on it’s side, but there’s no one there to clean it up.

The red light at the next intersection is blinking, swaying from side to side in the wind she cannot feel. There’s a car stopped at it, halfway over the crosswalk, driver’s side door left open.

It’s like everything stopped and everyone took off in the resulting few minutes, as fast as they could.

It almost feels like there’s a storm coming, something worse than what’s already overhead. The horizon is pitch black, the clouds swirling and breaking apart before her eyes. There’s a raven clutching tightly to the pole directly above the light, swivelling back and forth until it catches sight of her. It stops and lets out an alarmingly loud _caw_ , something she shouldn’t even be able to hear over the thunderstorm. It does it again and again, wings half-outstretched like it’s about to take off directly for her.

She finds herself on the sidewalk, ducked under a tree, hoping that it will conceal her. The bird stops it’s cawing, but she watches it wheel up into the sky and over the building directly to her right before it disappears, towards the blackened horizon.

She can smell things – the acrid tang of a leftover fire, the rot of bodies that have been left exposed for far too long. The frustrating thing is that she can’t see anything. There _are_ no bodies. There’s nothing to suggest anything went wrong at all, even though she can tell something did. This can’t possibly be the future, everything vacated and left tipped on it’s side.

There’s no way.

The smell of the fire is still getting stronger, though. It almost smells like it’s coming from _inside_ the building, which shouldn’t be possible either. There’s no signs of flames, no smoke billowing out into the sky. She creeps up into the entrance anyway, peering in. The front cases of the bakery are all smashed in, the oven behind the counter still blinking on. There’s a pot full of water on the stovetop, the bubbles boiling over and splashing onto the floor. That may explain the burning smell, but nothing else.

Even when she tries to turn the oven off, repeatedly, the light stubbornly stays on, as does the heat wafting off from it. Her eyes are burning faintly, but she can’t tell from what. Nadir always tells her that her eyes go all weird when she does this, completely whited over like they’re trying to hide whatever’s going on from someone who could be watching, but she’s never felt anything from it.

The rain stops.

She’s so intent on turning the oven off, for whatever reason, that she almost misses it. Everything goes silent, save for the faint, random ticking of the oven. The raven hasn’t returned.

She turns back to the door, and there are feathers falling from the sky.

Not just the inky black of the ravens – white, and varying shades of brown, a gray so dark they might as well come from the clouds themselves. Within seconds they’re covering the entirety of the street in a blanket so thick that there’s no catching sight of anything that could be beneath.

Something clangs far behind her, towards the back of the bakery.

Her eyes refuse to leave the street for a moment, but it doesn’t stop. She could go outside right now and hardly see more than an arms length in front of her face.

She turns and heads for the back room instead, towards the source of the noise.

There’s only two things down the hall – the locked door to the bathroom, and a staff-only door. She very carefully props it open. It’s just food storage – shelves and shelves full of boxes and cooking utensils. A large metal bowl has fallen off the shelf and come to rest in the middle of the room, still rolling gently back and forth.

The air shifts behind her, the squeak of something against the tiled floor, and she dives out of the way, towards the back wall and the door of the freezer.

The knife misses her.

The hand one hundred percent absolutely does not.

She doesn’t get even the barest glimpse of the man’s face before he’s got her by the throat and then pinned up against the freezer door. Knife in one hand, her neck under the other. He leans in so close there’s hardly anything she can see to distinguish him save for his very beady, dark little eyes, too much like the fucking bird, a thick knotted scar that skips over his left eye—

“Don’t think you should be here yet, little witch.”

She tries to speak but finds that she can’t. So that’s great. She can’t breathe. It feels more like he’s about to pop her head off rather than choke her out. His other hand is descending closer, the tip of the knife digging into her gut.

A screaming starts up outside – a long, thin wail that rises and then falls, but it never lets up. It sounds like it’s right outside the door and then six blocks the opposite way in the exact same second. It’s nothing like the yelling that’s coming through very faintly from her ears, a different voice altogether—

The knife breaks the first layer of her skin.

The freezer door falls away from behind her, but it’s not the icy ground she slams into.

It’s the floor of the cabin.

She hits the ground with a harsh thud, eyes flying open to see Nadir crouched over her, looking very frantic about pretty much everything.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she snaps. “Are you serious? I told you not to do this shit while I wasn’t around.”

Tanis is still not doing great in the breathing department and tunes out whatever rant Nadir is about two seconds from going on. The chair is knocked over. She’s on the ground next to it. When she glances up at the table the candles are burned halfway down, but that should have taken hours to happen. She knows time is something else, that it doesn’t add up, but that’s too long.

She glances out the window. The sun is high in the sky, at least noon. It’s really has been hours.

“Hey,” Nadir says, slightly softer. “Look at me. Are you okay?”

She’s just going to choose not to answer that one, at least not at this particular second. Whatever comes out, if anything does, is not going to be something Nadir wants to hear.

“Why am I on the floor?” she manages, instead.

“I pushed you out of the chair,” Nadir tells her. “I spent ten minutes trying to pull you back out, but nothing was working, so I figured that might.”

“Thanks?”

Ten minutes. It’s never taken that long to get her back, unless someone’s gotten very good at lying to her recently. She could have died, somewhere on the other side. No one would have been able to pull her back then, no matter what they did. She doesn’t know what happens, if you were to die on the other side. What becomes of the body that’s left here.

Nadir finally backs off and rights the chair, but two seconds later leans down to basically pick her up off the floor and deposit her back in the chair. She sits there pretty uselessly while Nadir blows out the candles and then takes the bowl to the sink to empty it. There’s a spot of blood on her shirt, directly over the center of her stomach, and she remembers the knife digging in there and breaking through her skin.

She spends so long staring that it lends enough time for Nadir to turn around, too, and they’re both staring at the same thing.

“I thought things couldn’t hurt you.”

“They – they can, it just isn’t supposed to transfer over to the real world.”

Because she’s been hurt over there before. Even just having fallen and scraped her hands, it doesn’t matter. She comes back and nothing’s wrong with her. And while it’s true that the skin on her stomach is smooth and unmarred, the spot of blood is still bright on her shirt. It had happened. Something had hurt her.

 _He_ had hurt her.

Nadir tucks a sweater around her shoulders, and she jolts. Her skin is clammy, frigid to the touch, and she hadn’t even realized. She rummages around for a bit, putting the candles back in the drawer. Cleans up the plate of food she hadn’t even finished before she had gone under.

She pissed – understandably so. Tanis can’t imagine it’s very pleasant for Nadir to look around a corner and just find her gone.

Not when it’s happened before.

When Nadir finally finishes doing everything with an angry touch Tanis has wrapped the sweater tighter around her shoulders and is doing her best to at least look guilty about it. Not that it helps very much.

“You didn’t even lock the door,” Nadir says. Yep, still angry. “Someone could’ve walked in here that wasn’t me, do you realize that?”

“I thought I did,” she says slowly. The few minutes before she went under are always a blur, after the fact, but she thought she had gotten up and locked it. It’s too easy to imagine today as yesterday. She could’ve been under when everyone showed up yesterday, and they could have come into the house—

Nadir sits down in the chair next to her and rubs a hand down her back. “You gotta stop freaking me out.”

Right. She forgot that _she_ was one of Nadir’s issues, along with the half a dozen others. She puts her head down on the table and nearly manages to knock her laptop onto the floor. Nadir reaches over her to close it and shove it away.

“Sorry,” she says, and tilts her face to the side to look at her.

“It’s fine. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

End of anger, for the time being. She’ll get hovered over for the entire day, no doubt about it, but it’s a small price to pay, for still being alive.

Nadir sits with her for a minute, until she starts to feel less cold, until her eyes are a little less unfocused. But the hand leaves her back, eventually, and Nadir gets back to her feet, leaving her alone at the head of the table.

Everything is very quiet, the air still. The birdsong outside the window goes silent, and then a raven lands on the windowsill. It glances around curiously for a few moments before it tilts its head, beak nearly pressed up against the glass pane, and looks directly at her.

She blinks, and it vanishes.

—

—

—

Tanis is always exhausted after going through something like that.

It’s like it drains all the energy from her. It’s like using any type of magic, blood-related or not. It takes a lot of time and productivity to get it right, a lot of focus. It exhausts you.

But Nadir can only attempt to helicopter parent her to death for so long. She hovers by the door for a very long time until Nadir finally concedes to take her to her parent’s house.

She isn’t sure what instinct is in her, that drives her to go home every time something happens. Maybe it’s the desire to actually feel like a kid again even just for a second, to feel safe and typical in the house she grew up in. There’s no way she should be getting on the motorbike, not when she’s still jittery and unsure and a tad wobbly, but it’s either that, or she walks.

She walks, and Nadir tosses her over her shoulder and carries her back to the house, probably.

She can see it already.

To be honest, she’s surprised Nadir is even allowing this. Sure, it’s her parents, but she clings tighter to her back than usual the whole way there, praying that she doesn’t become roadkill when Nadir turns a particularly sharp corner. She can’t really tell, but it almost feels like she goes slower, the entire time. Compensating for how slow her reaction time currently is.

Her parent’s house, right at the edge of Portland, is lit up all along the front, the cobblestone path worn and bathed in golden light. Both cars are parked in the driveway. The sense of coming home is always relieving, even if it doesn’t exist for very long.

She swings herself off the bike. “See you later?”

“Always,” Nadir responds, same as every other time. She’ll probably just go drive in more circles, until Tanis is ready to be retrieved. It’s a good break for both of them, little risk involved. Just the comfort of doing something familiar.

She stands there, and watches Nadir drive off, until she can no longer see her.

She’s not even halfway up the path when her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she pulls it out. It’s a text from an unknown number.

_Probably too soon, but any updates yet?_

Another one, a second later. _Sorry, it’s Vance. Dimara was going to text you but she fell asleep._

To be perfectly honest, she can’t even remember which one Vance is, which is truly telling of her current mental state. The fact that she can even narrow it down to two of them is astonishing.

She almost doesn’t respond. She’s tired, and this is way too soon.

 _Nothing_ , she types out. _Didn’t get much done today._

The response is almost instantaneous. _Everything okay_? These are the people she imagined breaking into her house, had she been scrying yesterday instead of day, and now she feels bad for even thinking it. They wouldn’t have done it. She can’t say that about most people, either. A million other people in this world would have chosen to take advantage of the situation, but she doesn’t imagine that they would have.

She’s not sure what to say. A simple _no_ will only result in more questions, and a yes will be a complete and total lie.

She doesn’t feel like being a liar, on top of everything else.

She pockets her phone and pulls out the key instead, even though she’s certain the door will be unlocked anyway. Her parents haven’t gotten the same lessons she has, about that particular issue. Sure enough, it turns easily enough under her hand, and she steps into the dark front hallway. There’s light pouring in from the kitchen, the noise of someone chopping something.

As stupidly cliché as the phrase is, there really is no other place like home.

“Oh hey, sweetheart,” Dad says, leaning around the corner. “Didn’t think we’d see you this week.”

She didn’t think that, either, but here she is. He must know that she’s had a rough day, because he steps forward like he’s done several dozen other times and wraps his arms around her, a tad on the tight and painful side. But that’s the kind of hug she needs right now, because it keeps her together when she doesn’t have the strength to do it herself.

“Everything okay?” he murmurs. So many people asking her the same question, one she still doesn’t have an answer to.

“Working on it,” she figures out, finally, and he pulls back to look at her. She knows she looks exhausted, like she hasn’t slept in a few days. It’s like a bad side-effect.

“You going to stay for dinner? Shouldn’t be long, your mother’s just finishing up.”

She nods and lets him lead her into the kitchen. Her mom nearly hits her with a dish towel she turns around so fast to embrace her, but at least that’s typical. She lets them sit her down to do nothing but watch.

It’s awful, but she never really shows up on a good day. They know that.

“Do you think you’ll ever convince Nadir to come in and have dinner with us?”

“Don’t really think this is her scene, mom.”

“Didn’t know having dinner with someone’s family was _a scene_ ,” her dad says. “She knows she’s welcome, right?”

Of course Nadir knows that. She tried to get her to come inside for the first few months that they were doing this, but it never worked. There’s a reason she doesn’t bother asking anymore. Why waste both of their energies, with the same question and reply?

Her parents know Nadir, at least. They know she’s safe.

Anything else, and they very well may freak out. They took the whole witch thing well, shockingly enough. But everything else still kind of freaks them out, the same way it does most people. Sitting them down at a table opposite Nadir will not go well, she’s certain of it. Not unless everyone agrees to keep their mouths shut.

Maybe. But maybe certainly doesn’t mean any time soon.

There’s a lot of things in the future she knows very little about.

—

—

—

Tanis doesn’t really remember exactly what she eats.

Something good enough that she eats everything on her plate in a record time, more ravenous than she had expected. Her and Nadir survive, but neither of them plan on being Master Chefs any time soon.

This is a rarity.

She really should make Nadir come inside.

She forces her parents to let her help with the dishes, as insistent as they are for her to continue sitting down, apparently for the rest of her life. It’s a simple task, something that will pull her mind away for a few minutes without actually pulling her under.

No risk there. Just scrub and rinse and hand them off. Repeat.

She finds herself gazing out the window anyway. There’s not much out there in the near-dark, save for the patch of grass they call a backyard and the neighbours fence not far off. But there’s something else there too, a faint silver whisp drifting over the back garden, not touching anything around it.

“What do you see out there?” her mom asks, genuine curiosity in her voice. There always has been.

She wasn’t lying to the others, yesterday. Most people don’t see ghosts. Certainly not normal humans. She’s seen them for a very long time, way before she even figured out what she was.

The issue with ghosts is that most of them look like nothing at all. The fact that theirs looks undeniably like a living, breathing human being doesn’t happen very often, at least not that she’s aware of. Usually they’re nothing more than vague, shapeless twists of light, some only highlighted by a car’s passing headlight, or the moon. Sometimes they’ll almost look like a person. Almost but not quite. No distinguishable features. Once in while it will appear as if they’ve been warped by the wind and time itself, stretched too thin and too wide, as tall as the trees around him.

There’s nothing telling anyone in this world what keeps certain ghosts here, and what enables most normal people to pass on.

And most of them don’t have voices to ask, anyway.

“You don’t see it?” she asks, already knowing the answer. She still points a finger towards the window anyway, and her mother follows it, tracing it with her eyes. It’s hovering very ominously over their tomato plants now, and her mother squints, shaking her head.

“It’s pretty incredible, that you can see things most people can’t.”

“And you are one of the only people who thinks that,” she scoffs, handing her another plate. “Why do you think I’m hiding the way I am?”

She needs to get them to start locking the door more often, especially once it gets dark. People could come after them just for knowing her, for birthing her in the first place. The worry for them never really goes away, it just drifts to the back of her mind when more pressing matters present themselves.

Her mother leans her head against hers. She’s taken the plate but is still staring outside, almost vacantly. Like she’s trying to will something into existence.

“What would you do?” she asks. “What would you do, if I was stuck in this house? If something was keeping me from leaving?”

She glances up at her, eyebrows furrowed. “Find someone who could get you out.”

“And what if you were the only one that could? What if there was no one else in the world who had the answer to a problem like that?”

The concern in her eyes has grown tremendously now. Possibly involving some sort of dawning realization, about why Tanis is not having her greatest day in recent weeks. No matter how much she pieces together, it won’t truly make sense.

“I’d do anything in my power to get you out,” she says slowly. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know that.”

It’s the issue with what she _doesn’t_. Maybe if she had more knowledge, this wouldn’t be so hard to figure out. She has Nadir, and her parents, but maybe if she wasn’t alone someone else could offer her advice, on what to do here.

She’s gotten far too used to being truly, properly alone. In this world, and on the other side. Surrounded by things that are happening and people that won’t ever get it, no matter what she explains.

Maybe the ghosts are the only ones who gets something like that.

She glances back out the window. It’s still drifting there, alone, the darkness it’s only friend, wrapped around it’s shoulders like a familiar shawl, or the hug of an old friend. But even that won’t do anything.

It won’t make her feel any better. It won’t save her, if the future really is coming for them.

And it won’t get a ghost out of a house, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for 100 hits, it means a lot.


	9. Cause Of Death: Falling

Nadir really, really hates watching Tanis go back home.

But not for the reason you’d think.

She doesn’t fear leaving her. Doesn’t fear what could happen to her, if she does. It’s the pain of watching someone go back to a family, of watching one of them embrace her if she dares to linger too long, taking her back in like she never left. She longs for that. She hasn’t had that in hundreds of years. She doesn’t remember what it’s like, to have the warm embrace of a mother, the protective look of a father hovering over you.

There had been a part of her, way back when, that had wanted to let them know that she was alive. But what do you do, in a situation like that? In that day and age, she would have been killed immediately, if someone had recognized her walking around.

In fact, that _did_ happen.

Nadir was just smart enough to stay away, after that.

She just misses them. Misses the feeling of home. She’s not even sure she would recognize it, at this point. She fears stepping into Tanis’ house and never wanting to leave, fears the glance of a parent settling over her and crushing her once again.

There’s a part of her that thinks Tanis understands, regardless of how hard she initially pushed for her.

And she’s grateful she doesn’t push, anymore.

So, she speeds off down the road a hair too fast, like always, unless Tanis is on the back. She’s not sure if Tanis stares after her or not. She never sticks around to find out. She never looks back.

There’s a lot of trouble, in looking back.

She finds herself pulling into the parking lot of the same diner she always does, the last one that exists before you reach the town boundaries of the Cape. She parks the bike in the shadowy corner, far at the back right before the trees start. The girl standing at the front counter seems to recognize her, for how often she winds up here, and puts her in the same booth as always.

There’s always the same people here, or at least the same groups. At least one old couple with their cups of coffee, nearly silent. A gaggle of young teenagers who shove two tables together without asking, as per the usual, loud enough to wake the dead. One lone guy who’s here even more often than she is, by the looks of it.

And it’s always the same woman that winds up with her, too.

Older. Fifties or sixties, maybe, except her hair is always dyed jet black and this time there’s a little streak of purple in her bangs. Her name’s Moira, or so she says. Apparently, she adamantly refuses to wear the nametag that every other employee in this establishment does.

But Moira always sets a coke down in front of her within a minute of sitting down. Doesn’t usually ask her what she wants, anymore, because it’s almost always the same thing. If she does it’s long after she’s entered the order, and there’s no changing it. But sometimes if there’s a dessert left over in the fridge, or something new she doesn’t know about, it just ends up on the table in front of her with no explanation for it.

And she never charges her for it, either. She can’t shake the feeling that Moira just knows, somehow, even though it’s impossible. She also can’t shake the feeling that Moira isn’t all the way human, either, but she doesn’t have the balls to ask, when she’s being so nice to her all the time. No reason to fuck that up.

So, it’s either Moira knows, vaguely, or she just feels bad that a twenty year told turned four hundred and fifty four year old keeps showing up for service alone at least once a week, because she has no friends beyond a woodland witch who keeps her sane more often than not.

It’s just as pathetic as it sounds, really.

Her typical sandwich and fries arrives in record time, and she watches Moira eventually herd the group of teenagers out the door with a fry practically hanging out of her mouth. She refills the coffee for the old couple and then sits down in the booth across from her with a thump. Sometimes she does. Sometimes she doesn’t.

Nadir doesn’t question it.

“How are you doing, kid?” she asks, and then reaches forward to nab a fry off her plate. That’s pretty typical.

“Fine, all things considered.”

“What’s all things?”

There’s not even a good place to start, on that list. Moira would probably kick her out before she even got three points into it, whether she was finished her food or not. She shrugs, and Moira rolls her eyes.

Neither of them ever push any issues. That’s the good thing, about a relationship that’s nice but not too close for comfort. There’s no danger of any explosion, of anything terrible happening in a place where it shouldn’t.

The bell above the door chimes again, and she watches a young couple walk in, hand in hand. No older than sixteen, probably, and they’re smiling very dopily at each other. They could have followed the girl behind the counter into hell and neither would have noticed.

Moira sighs. “Well, I have to go deal with them. Let me know if you need anything. And quit staring at them.”

She blinks and looks back to the other woman. It’s not even like she was staring at them for that long.

“I think you need a boyfriend,” Moira says. “Or a girlfriend. Or just a friend in general.”

“I think I’m good.”

“Lie of the century,” Moira points out, and gets up.

“Several centuries,” she mutters under her breath, and Moira looks at her for a second but doesn’t open her mouth to question it. Not quiet enough to not be heard. At this point, she wants someone to hear it. It would be easier, than all of this.

She eats the rest of her food in a rush and downs the last of the coke before she heads up to the counter to pay. No use in making Moira come back for her. She’ll be back next week anyway, most likely, and will repeat a conversation that may not have happened tonight but that’s happened at some point, in the previous year.

It really has been a year, since she started coming here. Two, since she showed up in the general area of Portland and found Tanis. She hadn’t always stayed, not in the beginning. It hadn’t felt like an option. She wasn’t supposed to have a home, wasn’t supposed to have someone to look after.

Wasn’t supposed to have a purpose, anymore. Or at least be capable of finding one.

There’s no flash from her phone as she steps back out into the darkening lot. No sign of Tanis, yet. Too early for retrieval, then; she would never pull her away from something more quickly than she desired, not when Nadir knows how precious it is to hold onto it.

She knows all the facts; about how important it is to hold onto fragile things.

How important it is too, to realize how quickly they can be taken away.

She gets back on the bike and finds herself turning left once again, even further from town. Right towards the water, where there are still a few straggling families out, splashing through the shallow water in the sunset’s dying rays. It’s like they’re oblivious to everything that’s happened here, recently. Or maybe they just don’t care. That’s what humans are good at, at least from what she remembers of truly being one. Maybe she just cared too much. Maybe that was her issue.

Or maybe that’s still her issue. It’s looking more and more like a distinct possibility as time continues to pass.

The lighthouse not far away is old, and just tall enough that a fall would be dangerous for any one person. She can only go as far as the side of the road. There’s only the faintest path, through the tall grass and the sand, trampled by too many feet. It sits built into the dark rocks, the ocean spraying over it as they collide. The light at the top isn’t on – it never is.

It probably doesn’t work. Like how most things work as time goes on, or rather don’t.

She takes her time tromping through the grass and over the rock to get there. The people are far enough away that they won’t think to look down this away for a lone person. She’s gotten good at wandering, at pulling herself into places she has no right to be, when someone is turned the other way.

The steps leading up to it are cracked and broken, and more gives way underneath her feet as she approaches. There’s a heavy metal chain hanging limp through the door and the nearest handle, but the lock is broken clean off and resting on the windowsill to her right. She gently prods at the door and takes a step forward as it swings in, creaking alarmingly loud. There’s graffiti everywhere. A long, jagged crack all the way through the next highest window. The metal stairs creak and shake at even the slightest step.

Like she said, it’s not that high. She awaits the moment one of the stairs will finally snap under her weight and send her plummeting to the ground below.

Her footsteps echo, and more than once she glances down, convinced someone is following her up. It wouldn’t be so much of a surprise as a concern, but there’s never anything behind her. Maybe it’s just haunted.

Apparently that’s the Cape’s thing.

No one ever even bothered to lock the door at the top of the stairs, and she steps out onto the balcony with ease. It’s not a very large bound, but the air up here feels better to breathe. There’s a spray in the air from the ocean below, the sunset blinding, turning the water a fiery shade of orange as she sits down.

Her legs swing over the edge of the balcony, and even with her arms rested across one of the metal railings she still feels her stomach drop a little, as her feet realize there’s no solid ground beneath them anymore.

It feels like another place here, and another place is easier than dealing with what’s on the ground. All of those families on the beach, they have no idea. Their lives are so simple.

Her life _could_ have been that way. She wonders about it a lot, and what it would have been like, had she not let herself die the first time. If he hadn’t decided that day was the day he was finally done with her.

She’s torn, between wondering and longing for that normal life, and being grateful for the fact that she’s been here so long. Not many people, not many creatures get that opportunity, not the way she has. But sometimes she thinks it would be easier to be dead. Moira said that to her, once. _Being dead would be easier than happily greeting the next customer that walks in here._

She had also quickly added a – _unless it’s you, kid, you’re fine to come in –_ but Nadir had gotten the gist of it.

She looks down. It’s higher than you would think, looking up at it from the ground.

She’s never died from falling before, and sometimes she’s tempted. There’s a long list of ways to die, and she’ll probably never get close to the bottom of it, but every once in a while she thinks she should just get it over with.

It would be easy, to jump. To just let herself slip off. Worst case scenario is she breaks every bone in her body when she lands on the rocks and spends a few hours dying. Best would be that she lands the right way and breaks her spine. Or her neck. Whatever hit first.

If she pushed herself off the balcony hard enough, took a leap off the railing, she might be able to hit the water.

But drowning’s not a particularly fun way to go out, she’s discovered.

There’s no telling what would happen, if she died here right now. She could wake up anywhere. Tanis would text her later on and not get a response. It’s been twenty years, since the last time. She could just tell everyone she was born in ’98 and start over. Twenty years old, ready for the next step in life.

She can’t do it.

Next to her, her phone lights up, ringing with Tanis’ number attached to the screen. Her heart always jumps into her throat at the sight of that, no matter how much she tries to force it down.

“Hey,” she answers, keeping her voice even. “What’s up?”

“Dad said he would drive me home in a few minutes, so you don’t have to wait out for me,” Tanis replies. “Unless you want to stay out for a while longer.”

Code for _if you want to wait until he’s gone to come back, that’s fine_. Ninety-nine percent of the time she goes back to pick her up, but occasionally they offer to drive her back. Maybe they can tell she’s rattled. Definitely more than usual.

“Yeah, I will. Thanks.”

“Did you eat?”

“I’m not you,” she reminds her. “I remember to do those things, yes.”

She can feel Tanis’ scowl through the phone. “Shut up. Where are you?”

“Lighthouse.”

“Don’t fall.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Back again with the scowl, more intensified than before, if she was a betting woman. The thought leaves her mind though, about letting herself drop off the edge. It would be worse, to have Tanis know she was here and tell her not to, and then do it anyway. Tanis would figure out what happened instantly, if she never came back home.

“You doing okay?” Nadir asks. “Earlier was worse than usual.”

She didn’t want to say that to her face, but this time was different. She’s never come out of scrying looking that blatantly terrified, that glazed over. And that spot of blood on her shirt was still worrying. It was sitting in a pile of their laundry, but honestly, Nadir was considering burning it. Things like that don’t just happen unless it’s for a reason.

“I’m okay,” she says quietly. “We can talk later, if you want. I just don’t really want to get into it here. They’re asking enough questions as is. I don’t want to freak them out.”

“They just want to help.”

“I know that. But they can’t. I’d rather not get them involved in something they can’t help with anyway.”

“Then you have to let me,” she insists. “Help you, that is.”

“And like I said, we can talk later,” Tanis says. “Just not – not here. Not right now. I don’t even know what to say yet.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Tanis makes a small noise of something that sounds like disagreement. That’s different, too. Tanis always knows what’s going on, and what she sees, and what it has to do with everything and anything.

But not this time.

“Hey,” Tanis says quietly. “Are _you_ okay?”

“I’m alive.”

Tanis sighs. “That’s not funny, you know. Alive’s not the same as okay, and you know it.”

“Clearly you have enough to worry about. You don’t have to add me to the list.”

“But I’m going to. And I’m sorry for being a dick earlier, but if you’re allowed to worry about me I’m allowed to worry about you.”

“You weren’t being a dick,” Nadir says quietly. “You were just messing around, I know that.”

“Doesn’t mean I wasn’t being a dick.”

“Tanis, it’s fine. Don’t stress it.”

“You can’t criticize me,” Tanis says, voice in a little bit of a hurry. Like she’s trying to get everything out as quickly as she can manage to. “If you’re going to insist that I need to let people help me, then you need to let someone help _you_.”

“You being my shrink is not going to end well for either of us.”

That’s frustration, now. But Nadir doesn’t feel frustrated. She just feels tired. And still half-tempted to jump, if she’s being honest.

She pulls the phone back to make sure the line isn’t dead, and then brings it back to her ear. Tanis is still there, but silent. Tanis being silent usually isn’t good either. Bad things happen when she goes quiet.

“I’m sorry,” Tanis murmurs.

“It’s—”

“Don’t you dare say it’s fine,” Tanis interrupts. “You’re not fine, I’m not fine. None of this is fucking fine. It feels like there’s not a single person in this world that can help me with anything, and you won’t even tell yourself the truth, let alone him, so that’s that. I think we both need a fucking shrink.”

Is feeling like she’s going to cry better than the temptation to jump? She’s not sure.

She’s never seen Tanis cry. Not even all the way back in that bathroom, when it looked like she was on the verge of a panic attack. Not once. The phone line is still going strong, even if neither of them are. Some days she feels like the weakest thing in the world, when in actuality it couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Text me when you get back to the house,” she requests, and can hardly even hear her own voice over the sound of the ocean. But clearly Tanis can.

“I will. See you later?”

It’s a weighty question. Heavier than it would be in a conversation between two normal human beings. She looks down at the rocks, rough and broken, darker than ever. The sun is nearly touching the horizon.

One slip, and she’s falling. That’s all it would take.

“Yeah,” she responds, and it’s not an agreement.

It’s a promise.

She hears the line click off, but keeps the phone pressed to her ear for a moment longer before she lets it fall into her lap. It would fall easier than she would, one quick slide off her legs and into open air. She brings her knees up to keep it from happening and lets her head thud against the railing. It hurts, but not nearly enough. It’s a split second of dull pain, not enough to distract from everything else.

The families down on the beach are gone.

She’s still here.

—

—

—

She isn’t sure how long she sits there.

Long enough for the sun to sink below the water, to leave her enveloped in darkness. All the sounds of the cars on the road behind her fade off. People headed home for the day, satisfied with what they’ve seen and what they’ve completed thus far.

The railing is not a good place for her head, she’s realized. She’s starting to get a headache.

It’s a little cold, too. The wind is unforgiving, coming up from the water when she’s this high up.

She can’t really think of a good enough reason to move, until she realizes it’s been too long.

Her phone is still lying abandoned in her lap, and she scoops it back up. Tanis called her at 7:37. It’s 8:14 now. Even if they had taken a few extra minutes to leave her parents house, Tanis would have been home by now. There’s no traffic on the roads. Nothing stopping them.

Tanis should have been back by now. And if that was the case, Tanis should have texted her.

She always does.

 _You home?_ she types out, but she’s already getting to her feet, in preparation for the lack of response. She edges back inside the door, where the wind can no longer sting at the corner of her eyes, and stares down at the screen.

The clock ticks over to 8:15, and then 8:16.

She starts heading down the stairs, much faster than she ascended.

Halfway back to the bike she calls Tanis’ number, praying. Even if for some reason she hadn’t left her parents house yet, even if they were in the car driving back, she’d pick up. She’d answer. Of all the things they mess with each other about, this isn’t one of them.

It occurs to her, as she gets on the bike and pulls back out onto the coastal highway, that she could call her dad. Call him and see if something’s wrong.

She remembers what Tanis said, about not getting them involved when they couldn’t help to begin with.

If something’s wrong, _actually w_ rong? He’ll be gone too, long before she gets there.

But this is why she has the bike. So she can get wherever she needs to go as fast as she physically can, so there’s no time left in-between to wonder. It’s a breakneck speed to the most literal point. If something were to happen now she’d die, helmet be damned.

She sees the smoke before anything else, just starting to billow free from the canopy. The road this way is nearly deserted. No one else is going to see it, and if they do they’ll dismiss it as nothing, as a trick of the dark light. The smoke’s bad enough, from a distance, but the light coming out from the woods is even worse. She doesn’t even hit the drive before she sees it. It’s like someone lit the forest up from the inside, too bright and unnatural to be some form of magic. It’s the red and oranges spilling out from between the trees, not unlike the sunset, but in a place where such a thing doesn’t really exist, especially not this far into the dark.

And she knows fire when she sees it.

When the bike finally skids into the little clearing and the house is half on fire, it doesn’t surprise her. It’s the terror that floods through her veins that leads to the bike slamming into the ground she struggles to get off it so quickly. The flames edging up from the roof have already caught onto several of the trees that drape over it.

The house is on fire. The woods are on fire.

It almost feels like she is, too.

There’s smoke billowing out of the front door, half-open like it was forgotten about. Tanis never answered her. Someone came to hurt her, or the both of them. And that’s if she gets lucky. Tanis could already be dead, there could be no point to any of this.

She squeezes her eyes shut as she pushes through the initial cloud. She may be made of fire but that doesn’t mean she’s immune to it. Most of the front entryway is already blackened to a crisp, and it’s extended itself into the living room, rapidly approaching the kitchen. It hasn’t made it back to the hallway yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Or maybe it’s not.

There’s already a body on the floor, half concealed by the hall. She can only see the legs, enough to tell that it’s not Tanis, but it doesn’t make any sense. The smoke is so thick by the time she crouches down next to it that she’s hardly able to pick out any distinguishable feature, save for the fact that it’s a man. His body is completely stiff, face frozen in object shock. He has not a single obvious injury, but his eyes are still wide open, staring off sightlessly. Terrified.

She knows he’s dead without even reaching for a pulse.

“Nadir.”

She nearly falls over backwards at the sound of Tanis’ voice, hardly audible over how loud the fire is roaring in her ears. She’s standing at the other end of the hall, blood dripping down from a gash opened up on her forehead, little rivulets of it running between her fingers. She’s got one of their only kitchen knives in her left hand but looks as if she’s about to drop it.

She sags weakly against the wall. “I was really hoping it was you.”

Nadir steps over the body and rushes forward to grab her, because it looks like she’s about to end up on the floor any minute now. Apparently earlier wasn’t enough for her.

Tanis grabs at her arms and leans against her, heavily. The knife clatters to the ground between them.

“I think he was here the whole time,” she manages. “I told you, I locked the door earlier. He could’ve gotten in while I was under and I wouldn’t have known.”

She glances back towards the body, some ten odd feet behind them. “What the fuck did you do to him?”

“I think I inflicted so much pain on him that he had a heart attack?” she guesses, sounding very fine about all of that. “Accident, I swear. I just meant to knock him out but that was _before_ he hit me in the head, and I kind of panicked.”

Okay, and Nadir _knew s_ he was capable of doing that. She’s poked her half a dozen times and shocked her, almost jokingly. Like a miniature bolt of lightning up her arm. She can’t imagine Tanis grabbing someone and actually meaning it, actually putting so much thought into it that she could kill them.

But apparently that’s a thing.

She’s not going to lie, at this current moment in time, she’s kind of grateful for it.

Clearly it’s drained Tanis, though. She was already weak and shaky from earlier, and now on top of the probable concussion and the blood loss she just took the rest of her energy and channelled it into killing the guy that came at her. It’s no wonder she looks so freaked out.

“Is this what you saw earlier?”

“You think if I saw this earlier I wouldn’t have told you?” Tanis asks incredulously. “ _Hey, Nadir, I had a vision of our house getting burned down, think we should move_?”

She starts herding her towards the front door, choosing not to grace that one with a reply. That doesn’t really help anything. Judging by that, what she saw was worse. Worse than their house getting burned down, almost with her inside it. Right now she can’t imagine anything worse than what she’s currently standing in the middle of.

Or at least she thinks that way for two seconds, until she sees what’s just outside of the door.

There’s an SUV skidding into the clearing, coming so close that it nearly runs over her bike. There’s another one just beyond it. The first man that gets out is holding what appears to be a shotgun, which is bad, and the woman just behind him has _two, w_ hich is much worse. It’s still him that yells back, though, giving orders that she can’t even hear.

If those cars are full, that’s at least a dozen of them. And who knows if there’s more coming.

“Okay, fuck, not that way,” she spits, and pulls Tanis back through the kitchen. This really isn’t good. They’re going to get surrounded. The dead guy on their floor was probably supposed to check in saying he killed her, just like Tanis was supposed to text her back. When you don’t get confirmation, you come running. Doesn’t matter what species you are.

“You sure you can’t just light them all up?”

“More worried about you, if I’m being honest.” Tanis is probably about to hack up a lung. Who knows how long the house spent burning before she got here. That’s a level of smoke inhalation that could kill her, if something else doesn’t first.

And besides, she could kill them all. There’s no doubt about that. But chances are, if she tries to take down twelve people right now, she’s going with them. That leaves Tanis alone out here with nothing, and that’s if she manages to kill them all. If she leaves even one alive, with Tanis as weak as she is, she dies too.

There’s no point to that.

She shoves the both of them into the bathroom and locks the door behind her, going for the window. Not a single one of them in this house is going to open easily, for how old they are,

She’s hardly even started fumbling with the latch when Tanis reaches into her pocket and pulls her phone out. No telling where Tanis’ phone ended up, in the middle of all of this, and she doesn’t have time to ask about any of it. Clearly, she had more pressing matters on hand.

The window finally slams open with a very loud, obvious noise, and looks back at Tanis.

Because apparently now’s the time to talk on the phone.

She doesn’t resist Nadir’s hands urging her up on the edge of the tub and out the window, but she keeps her hand resolutely holding the phone to her ear.

“Dimara,” she says all of a sudden, and Nadir rips the phone out of her hand and doesn’t so much push her out the window as she gives her a gentle shove into the grass below. They’re in the house now; she can hear them. If she can hear them, they’re closer than she wants them to be.

She clambers onto the windowsill, and holds up the phone. “Dimara?”

“What in fresh hell are you two doing? It sounds like—”

“Like our house is being burned to the ground and we’re about to get surrounded?”

There’s silence on the other end. “What?”

The footsteps are right outside the bathroom door. She hears them pause, hears someone yelling. The crackling of the fire is directly above her head, about to come down from the roof and engulf her.

Tanis has backed up enough, into the cover of the woods, but she isn’t leaving. She wouldn’t just leave. And Nadir really, really didn’t want to admit this.

“If you want us to help you,” she says slowly, trying to keep her voice as quiet as she possibly can. “Then we might need your help right now.”

Someone kicks the door, so hard that it nearly splinters apart from the first blow. The house is too old. It went up in flames like a pile of kindling, and the door won’t hold for more than another second.

“Right now,” she repeats, and the door flies off it’s hinges.

The guy on the other side looks at her. Puts his finger over the trigger.

A blast of fire hits him in the chest.

It doesn’t so much knock the gun out of his hands as it goes right through it. The flames pass over his hands and he screams, sharp and piercing as it knocks him right to the ground, almost next to the other body. The front of his shirt is already on fire, rapidly stretching down to the belt of his jeans, and his frantic writhing and kicking is only making it spread faster.

It’s been too long, but the ball of fire seemingly nestled in her palm is familiar, burning hot but a comfort at the same time.

Three bullets hit the mirror to her right near simultaneously and shatter the entire thing, and she throws herself back out the window and hits the ground. By the time she scrambles half to her feet there are bullets hitting the ground everywhere around her, and she slams into Tanis to push her deeper into the woods.

They could lose them, but probably not forever. She didn’t even realize, but she dropped the phone. That, or melted it with her bare hands. She’s not entirely sure.

“One down?” Tanis asks, sounding more hopeful than she should right now.

“Eleven to go,” she responds.

“Are they coming?”

“No idea. We’re alone right now regardless. We just need to—”

“Single them out, I got the idea.”

That still doesn’t change the fact that they’re firing into the woods after them, bullets slamming into the ground and trees, whizzing past them. Just hoping they hit something long enough for them to catch up. And it’s only a matter of time until one hits their mark.

She crowds Tanis up behind a tree and holds her there. Someone’s following. She can hear them crashing through the brush, no sense of subtlety. No idea that they’re giving themselves away. She lets the fire in her palms die out into the faintest glow, shuttering them back into almost near darkness. Enough to conceal them.

“I’m really glad I’m friends with you, or you’d be scaring the shit out of me right now,” Tanis murmurs, and she looks honest to god satisfied. Really rich, for a girl who’s also killed somebody with their bare hands tonight.

There’s another silhouette following the first, and then a third. She squeezes Tanis’ shoulder. “Stay put.”

She’s not sure what the chances of Tanis listening to her are, but it’s worth a shot. She creeps out from behind the tree, but steps right into the open. The man in the lead stops dead, and she holds her hands up. The two women behind him have never put their guns down, not even in a brief moment of respite.

“Murray,” the first woman says slowly. “She’s the one who—”

Put a fireball in a guy’s chest already? Precisely.

It’s too easy to let the fire grow between her hands. No source, not pulling it off the house after her. It just appears, illuminating the dark, and his eyes only widen for a brief second before he’s engulfed in the flames. He doesn’t fall immediately. For a moment there it’s like he’s a torch in the middle of the woods, standing tall and bright enough that she can keep sight of the other two. A tendril of fire yanks the first one’s gun out of her hands, and it cracks into a tree far into the forest, beyond where she can’t see. She’s down on the ground before she can even think to run, the fire traveling up her arm and licking up into her shoulder and neck, her hair going up in mere seconds.

The last one’s still standing there. She’s the one that had two guns, before. But two guns seem like nothing at all, when the still screaming bodies of her two companions are on the forest floor between them, evidence.

Evidence of what’s about to happen to her.

“You’re not the one we wanted,” she says, like that makes a difference.

“But you want me now.”

She always kind of feels like the bad guy, in all of this. Setting people on fire. If only anyone ever understood, that it’s not for fun. The woman isn’t just trying to keep an eye on her. She has half a mind to look for Tanis, too, to find where the missing link is. Maybe she thinks that if she can get to Tanis, she’ll have some leverage. There’s enough space between them.

At least that’s what she thinks, until the ground below her feet erupts into flame.

Nadir can feel it in her feet, too, her soles separated from the ground by her boots but still connected regardless. She can feel it moving in the earth, traveling along a path that only ends in one place.

There’s nowhere for the woman to go. It hits her in the legs and catches onto all the dead brush around her, too. She goes up in flames from the ground up, and her knees give out as she falls shrieking into the brush, rolling into everything that’s already on fire around her.

“Uh, Nadir,” Tanis says, and she turns around to look at her.

Or, you know, not just her. There’s Blair to look at too.

It dumps a little bit of ice into her veins, ironically enough, and the fire in her hands dies out again, like someone snuffed it out. He blinks at her. She’ll never not be stunned, at how fast vampires can move when they need to. Which means he left almost as soon as she let go of the phone.

“Not gonna lie,” he says. “Not much shocks me anymore, but that? That’s something.”

“You’re just shocked because you’ve finally met someone that can kill you,” Tanis says, which is true, funnily enough. She could probably set him on fire before he could do anything about it, and he’d burn to death. Maybe it’s not so funny, honestly.

“To be fair, most people could. They’re just too slow.”

As if on cue the shooting starts up again, but it’s closer to the two of them than it is to her. She starts forward again, about to grab Tanis and haul her off to a new spot, but Blair doesn’t move an inch. He holds out his arms and rolls his eyes, clearly looking to whoever’s apparently decided pointing a gun at him is a good idea.

“What the fuck are you going to do, shoot me?” he yells. “Be my guest!”

Stupidly enough, whoever’s got the gun must take that as a challenge. But vampires will always move faster than a bullet. She doesn’t even really see him move, because she’s still half-focused on Tanis, but a very large gun comes skidding through the undergrowth right next to them a second later, and all she hears is a very sharp _crack._ It’s pretty obvious what it is.

She leans away from the tree. There’s another one, too, who looks like he’s about to run away. Nadir can’t say she blames him. Blair takes the gun out of his hand like he just asked for it politely and then smashes him in the temple with it, hard enough that his head swivels around, fast enough that he collapses to the ground, dead almost instantly.

That gun lands back at their feet too, and Blair promptly lobs the guy like a baseball into the fire that’s caught in the grass at the edge of the house.

It should really freak her out, but she’s not sure what. Everyone she’s set on fire, today? The necks of the two people he just snapped? The six more people that they probably still have to kill?

Tanis sighs, and then presses her hand back to her bleeding forehead. “I have no shit now.”

Right. Because that’s what they’re bothered about, right now.

Blair seems pretty content with his makeshift bonfire, but he turns around to look at them. She really doesn’t know how to feel, watching him against the flames.

“So, are we gonna go find some marshmallows, or are we gonna kill everyone first?”

“Marshmallows,” Tanis says.

“Killing sounds great to me,” she says. Doesn’t think that sentence has ever come out of her mouth before, but it’s not a lie. Right now, she just can’t wait for this day to be over with.

Blair smiles very cheerfully. In response to what answer, she’s not entirely sure.

There’s not much she’s sure about, these days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I most likely have a very trying rest of the day ahead of me, so... pray for me, y'all.


	10. 72 Years Dead

Rooke didn’t realize, how much he hated being alone.

It’s hard to realize that, when you spend the greater part of seventy-two years not having a choice in the matter. Madeline didn’t count, not really. She didn’t bug him that much, because of how jumpy he was.

When the others left the house yesterday, all of them together for the first time, he felt an odd sort of terror settle over him. An irrational fear that none of them were coming back, that they were using this as some sort of excuse to get away from him once and for all. Even the second he thought it had been consumed with the fact that he was being stupid. They were coming back. He knew that.

That didn’t mean he still couldn’t think it, though.

This time it’s worse. This time it’s bad.

He hadn’t been able to hear anything that was happening on the other end of the phone, but Blair had. It hadn’t taken him long to leave the house, and thirty seconds Vance was going after him. They’d both beat anyone in this house there on foot. It had been the first cause for alarm, the first sign that something was really, truly wrong. The next was Dimara yelling for Celia, wherever she had been, and that had meant the inevitability of Rory following, and then Kelsea, who wasn’t about to be stuck here when she didn’t have to be.

No one really told him what’s wrong, either. So they all leave, with him on the other side of the door.

He can’t blame them for that. If something’s wrong, they’re going to help. He can’t physically do that. Hell, he can’t do that mentally either.

That doesn’t make it easy, standing there. Blair and Vance are long gone. The rest of them pile into the car and take off down the driveway. That leaves him properly alone once again, but this time with no clue at all about what’s going on.

This time it’s less of a wonder, if they’re coming back. It’s who’s coming back alive.

You’d think that would be less of a concern, for someone who’s been dead as long as he has. But he’s not willing to lose them now. There’s nothing certain, about what keeps someone’s spirit here. Chances are they’d all move on normally. They wouldn’t be here anymore.

And he doesn’t think he can handle that.

It’s pretty terrible. For a long while he refuses to move away from the door, even though keeping it open is letting in a cloud of mosquitos that he’s the only one immune to, now. When he finally brings himself to close the door he ends up perched on the back of the couch instead, even cracking open the window like that will allow him to hear better.

So, something bad obviously happened to one of the only people who’s got a concrete shot at getting him out of this house. That’s not the only reason he cares, but selfishly enough it’s one of the higher ones. But that doesn’t stop him from hoping everyone’s okay just for their own sake. There’s no helping him, if there’s no saving them.

Vance’s phone is lying forgotten on the table. Dimara and Blair clearly both took theirs, so he could call, but that doesn’t feel right. He shouldn’t try and get in the middle of this. They can handle it. Dimara’s been handling quite a lot, recently, and sometimes makes it look very natural.

Or, you know, she’s yelling at them. But that’s a technicality.

He doesn’t remember how long it’s been, since the initial phone call. They were all out of the house in less than two minutes, but he’s gotten very good at not checking the time. When you’ve got as much time to kill as he did, you learn to stop keeping track of it. It makes every minute seem longer, every day never-ending.

But now he can hear every single _tick tick_ of the grandfather clock in the hall that has never once stopped working, regardless of how old it is. He wants to be able to hear, so he refuses to turn the television on to drown it out, but by god is it annoying. He’s quite tempted to figure out how to turn it off, if that’s even an option. It’s not like it runs on batteries.

He eventually flattens his hands over his ears, which is kind of defeating the all-around purpose, but at least he won’t be driven insane by the time they get back.

The noise of the bike is the first thing he hears in nearly an hour, and it gives him enough reason to jump off the couch. Or nearly fall. But no one’s around to pay attention to the technicality, and even if they were he doesn’t think he’d care.

Everyone said one of them had a bike. That’s a good sign, right?

It’s the first thing up the drive, but the car’s headlights just behind it are nearly washing it out in the very bright glow. He can only make out the faint silhouette of one person on the bike but forces himself not to worry about that too much.

He’s gotten off the couch but is still staring out the window and trying not to be too hopeful when Blair knocks on it, out of nowhere. He jumps and bumps right into the table, sending the lamp rocking back and forth. Like the lamp hasn’t been damaged enough already.

Vance is right behind him, though, and manages a little smile while headed for the door. That’s good then, he thinks. Neither of them looks upset. Maybe slightly angry, if anything, but not enough for him to be truly worried.

He lets out a breath. A very large one.

He gets to the door at the same time Blair opens it from the other side. “Is everything okay?”

“Did you seriously stand in front of the window the entire time?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” he wonders, and Blair shrugs. Like Blair wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing, if their positions were reversed.

“Everyone’s fine,” Vance says, like he can sense him about to ask again. “Relatively speaking.”

“The house was not so fortunate,” Blair announces, and he feels his stomach drop a little. He leans around the two of them as both the bike and the car come to a stop. Still too far away for him to reach. Way too far.

The girl gets off the bike before anyone’s even moved to scramble out of the car. Her hands are streaked with soot and dust, blackened at the edges. When she reaches into the backseat he realizes it’s not her that’s the problem, it’s the other one. The one that was supposed to help him, he guesses. She’s the one bleeding, or at least she was. It’s dried in messy stripes all over her face, in the palms of her hands. It must be covering some of the ash, but he can imagine it still exists, somewhere. You can easily tell who got the brunt of it in that situation.

And everyone else is fine. It’s relieving, to actually see it. Blair and Vance were the first ones there, and there’s nothing wrong with either of them, so that’s what he suspected. But it’s hard to believe people, when they tell so many lies.

Even if it’s not these people that do.

The first one pulls the girl out of the car and holds her steady for a moment before she starts walking her up the porch, just in front of him. She looks worse up close, or maybe that’s just the exhaustion in her eyes. Dimara’s just behind the two of them, and she gives him a tight smile.

“What can I do?”

“First-aid kit would be good.”

Right. They have one of those now. Probably the best investment Dimara’s ever going to make, living here.

He heads off to the bathroom to retrieve it and returns in record time, but even then, the bloody one has already dropped herself down onto the couch before he gets there, the ashy one standing there in front of her. He really doesn’t like referring to them like that.

Dimara takes the first-aid kit from his hands. “Rooke, Nadir and Tanis.”

Well, as if meeting new people wasn’t awkward enough, now he’s got to talk to people who probably don’t want to talk to him, at the current moment. Not that it’s got anything to do with him personally.

Tanis looks up at him, though, and squints. “ _You’re_ the ghost problem?”

“I guess so?”

“God, that is fucking weird,” she says. “You really don’t look dead whatsoever.”

“That’s just what he wants you to think,” Celia chimes in, and flicks him in the back of the head. It stings a little bit less after that, knowing that she’s joking. You think it would go the opposite way.

Tanis continues staring at him for another moment, looking even more confused than she had previously, which is a stretch, before she attempts to lower her head into her hands. Nadir’s got her by both wrists before she can get anywhere close to interfering with whatever’s going on with her forehead.

He could stand there and stare, but that’s not going to help any. Dimara’s going to do the brunt of the work, and Nadir will probably insist on helping her. All he’s going to do is stand there and lurk over their shoulders.

Apparently, the others must have the same idea, because when he wanders off into the kitchen they’re all already in there, sitting or standing, apparently trying to be as quiet as possible.

He looks back over his shoulder, but can’t see any of them from here. “What happened?”

“Fucking hunters,” Blair says, which is about the most Blair explanation he’s ever heard. At least it clears one thing up.

“Apparently they came up from Providence,” Celia says. “Cleared out most of the witch population down in Rhode Island, so they’ve turned to looking up this way.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“We asked,” Celia says. Which is a very much Celia explanation.

“Did you ask nicely?”

“I always ask nicely,” Blair points out, and Kelsea gives him a look. There’s no way you’d even need personal experience to figure out what a blatant lie it is.

“But,” he asks slowly. “He told you. And then you let him go?”

“Well, I had full intentions on letting him go,” Blair emphasizes. “For like, thirty seconds anyway. Give him some hope, before I killed him. Thought it would be kind of funny—”

“That’s not funny at all?” Rory interrupts.

“Thought it would be kind of funny,” he repeats, slower this time. “But Nadir set him on fire, so I didn’t get the chance.”

Rooke looks around at everyone, searching for the last piece of a very weird, unnecessary explanation. He doesn’t get it. “Do you mean like, she threw something from the house at him, or?”

“No, like she set him on fire. With her bare hands.”

That— wasn’t at all what he was expecting. When both Blair and Vance said they had not a single clue what Nadir was, he didn’t imagine ever hearing something like that. Clearly, judging by the look on everyone else’s face, that’s not what they saw coming either.

“Not gonna lie, it was pretty cool,” Vance adds. “In a totally not funny way.”

So that’s Vance and Kelsea, who look a little mystified. Blair and Celia, who definitely thought it was funny and still do. And Rory, who mostly just looks confused. Which is about what he feels, as well. He can’t help but wonder what Dimara thinks, about all of this.

“Are they staying here?” he asks, and everyone shrugs, almost simultaneously.

Nobody’s been back in the basement since what he’s choosing to call Dooms Day, so they still haven’t created anymore usable space. There’s the four bedrooms upstairs, and the couches here. If Kelsea stays with Vance they’ll at least be able to sleep down here, for the time being. He can’t help but imagine someone will venture back downstairs, though. There’s no point to it how it is now.

But what if they stay, though? Will they even consider staying?

“I hope they do,” Kelsea says quietly. “I think they could use it.”

Everyone here needed it, apparently, or they’d be long gone by now. This house brought them all together, for very different reasons, and he thinks he needed it more than any of them. Unable to pass on with no idea why, stuck on this world with nothing around him, no reason to want to be here.

Until now, anyway.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and everyone looks at him in surprise. “I do too.”

It’s not a lie.

And it feels really good, to tell the truth.

—

—

—

So, seven turns to nine.

For a night, anyway.

At least that’s what they all think.

Blair seems pretty convinced that they’ll both be gone come morning, which is an actually funny thing, considering that’s what they all thought that about him. Like how Dimara came downstairs and saw Kelsea sitting at the table eating very oddly shaped pancakes, no doubt wondering why the hell she hadn’t gone home yet.

He never even winds back up in his room that night, because at about four in the morning he suddenly feels guilty, that he never even thought to offer his room up for them. It’s not even like he really needs to sleep. They both seem fine on the couches, out cold pretty quickly even though they’re both on edge, glancing around constantly like they’re worried something’s going to happen.

He feels even creepier, looking at them while they’re _sleeping,_ so he lets himself go.

Eyes closed, and he’s just gone. He can still see everything, but it’s like his body winks out of existence. Someone would walk by him now and not see anything. Maybe feel the faintest, icy chill down their spine, but nothing else. It’s the closest he feels to actually being dead, but he feels lighter like this. Less like anything matters.

He still has no idea why Beckett couldn’t see him. Ilara either, for how much she talked to him in the months after. He tried for so long. In the early days it was hard, to even keep himself corporeal long enough for it to happen. But even then, nothing. It was like he was invisible. Like he was properly dead.

Which he is, technically. But now that he’s got all these other people surrounding him, talking to him, being with him, it’s easy to forget that.

That’s dangerous thinking, for a dead person to start feeling alive again.

He’s a ghost. He can wander the halls at night the same way Blair can, only Blair can’t see him.

In retrospect, that’s oddly satisfying.

He winds up in the basement just before seven, doing nothing more than poking through some of the boxes. No one knows where the paper went, but he’s sure there are other copies somewhere. Beckett was meticulous about it, even after his parents packed up everything and moved Ilara down to one of the Carolinas.

He tried, for him. To get some sort of justice. He watched his brother try and give up, cry and scream, talk to him in the early hours of the morning like right now, the most desperate times when he wished Beckett would just let himself hear his voice, or something. Anything at all.

 Things like that are just fated to end badly.

He doesn’t get anywhere. He spends hours down there, opening boxes and closing them just as quickly. Everyone could have their own room, if he would just get in the right mindset and move everything aside.

The scary part is, he’s getting there.

Whatever time it is when he finally wanders back upstairs, he’s not sure. Kelsea comes over and squeezes him. Dimara passes him the glass of apple juice she had been pouring without thinking, and then goes to re-pour her own.

“I think they’re staying,” Kelsea whispers. It can’t be that quiet, because Vance looks right at her.

He leans out of the kitchen with her still attached to his waist. Sure enough, the two of them are still in the living room. Sitting on the same couch, now, but talking. None of the blankets have been folded back up. Neither of them looks in any hurry to move.

“You think so?”

“They called Tanis’ parents. They don’t want to risk going back there and dragging them into anything, but they don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

He’s been leaning out into the doorway to stare at them for more than what is deemed socially acceptable, so Tanis looks up and sticks her tongue out at him. He leans back into the kitchen.

Dimara must have a semi-good view, staring over their shoulders into what little of the living room she can see. She doesn’t look angry or upset, not even annoyed. Just pensive. That’s pretty odd, for how often she _does_ look annoyed.

“You should start charging rent,” he says.

She snorts into her apple juice.

—

—

—

They don’t leave.

Rooke is very secretly delighted to find out that Kelsea’s right. It doesn’t feel weird, having two more people in the house, even though it should. They surpassed weird a long time ago, especially for him.

No one really bugs them, the same way they kept to themselves for the most part after they found out about him. He thinks that helps. They’ve had each other for a while, clearly, and not very much else. They’re still getting used to this the same way he is.

He’s in the basement for the third morning in a row when he hears someone coming down after him. He almost thinks it’s going to be Rory, because he’s pretty sure he’s aware this is going on, but it’s not.

It’s Tanis.

He feels awkward talking to her. Mostly because the question that comes to mind almost every time is _hey, figured out how to get me out of the house yet?_ which she most definitely has not. Her ever-lasting headache is gone, and the concussion is fading, but she’s still got bandages. Still got open wounds.

She stops at the third last one. “Geez, how much shit did you have before you carked it?”

He opens his mouth to respond, but absolutely nothing comes out.

“Sorry, should I say that in a different way? You know, like, kicked the bucket? Pushed up the daisies? Went to meet your maker, except you actually didn’t for some strange and twisted reason?”

That is absolutely not a thing he should be smiling at, but he finds the corners of his lips twitching up regardless. Tanis looks pretty satisfied with herself. He’s only got a few boxes pushed off to the side, stuff he definitely doesn’t care about, and she nudges them with her foot.

“Would you care, if we got rid of this shit?”

He shrugs, still unsure of where he stands on that. “I don’t think so? Maybe a few things … but most of it I haven’t even looked at in over fifty years. I guess I just kind of forgot it was all down here.”

“Easier to forget?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. It’s easy to forget that she just lost all of her things to a fire too. She’s got nothing to her name now, save for the scorched and bloody clothes she brought in on her back, and Nadir. At least having someone is worth more than anyone knows.

“It would be nice, for you guys to have an actual place to sleep, hey?”

She gives him a knowing look. They’re really not subtle about pushing this whole moving in thing. “Yeah. It would.”

And well. That pretty much settles that.

—

—

—

They spend a lot of time down there, after that.

Tanis wasn’t around for the initial Dooms Day meltdown, so it’s easier to deal with. She doesn’t know the horrific story, although he suspects she will one day, and Nadir hasn’t asked either. Maybe they’ll have to, to figure this whole thing out, but for now it’s nice to have to himself.

It’s box after box, hour after hour. Every once in a while, she’ll hold something up, making sure he doesn’t care about it, before she tosses it into their ever-growing pile. Everyone comes down at some point, on some day. Never for as long as they’re down there.

It becomes his thing. Even long after everyone goes to sleep he’s still down there, moving slower than he does during the day, but still going through the methods.

It’s very dark when someone comes tromping down the stairs. He turned all the lights off sometime after midnight, because he doesn’t need them. He makes out Dimara very clearly, and she swings blindly for the light-switch for a moment before she gives up.

“I seriously cannot see a damn thing, so if you’re down here, make a noise.”

“Boo,” he says back, and her sigh is the loudest thing he’s heard in three hours.

“You know you don’t have to do this in the middle of the night, right?”

He shrugs, before he remembers that she can’t quite see him. “Got nothing else to do.”

He thinks they forget, that he doesn’t have to go to sleep. Not ever, if he doesn’t want to. Like he said, sometimes he acts so human and alive around them that even he forgets.

“I might have to take you up on your offer.”

“What offer?” she asks.

“You know, to get me some new stuff. If you’d still be willing to do that.”

“Why, so you don’t wear the same hoodie six days out of seven?”

He looks down at said offending hoodie. What she doesn’t know is that it’s one of the only new things he’s gotten, and even then, it’s something Madeline got him, something she left in a box and never made him question.

“It would be nice,” he says honestly. “Considering I’m getting rid of pretty much everything else.”

“Well, maybe wait a few days. See if you can come with me.”

“I thought that all got set back.”

“Tanis has been up a lot of nights too. Looking up weird shit on my laptop; you wouldn’t believe my search history now. I got some books for her today, too. She’s still trying.”

He hadn’t even realized she was still trying as hard as she is. He’s been so focused on the task in front of him that he had almost forgotten about the question in the first place, the reason they’re really here.

“I don’t think it would be so bad, being stuck in this house if you were all here.”

He’s very glad she can’t see him, because his face is doing something ridiculously complicated. He kind of wants to cry. He kind of wants to get up and hug her, but that’s a lot of boxes to navigate back through and very little time to do it before he loses his nerve.

“That should be on a Hallmark card,” she says, which is clearly a cover up for the small smile on her face, the happy glint in her eyes. “But I’m glad you think that.”

“Me too.”

He’s really grateful for all of this. He hasn’t felt grateful since 1946.

“I’m going back to sleep,” she says. “Don’t stay down here too long.”

“Night,” he murmurs. Watching her walk back up and disappear makes him realize that she only came down here at all to check on him. To make sure he was okay. He hears her footsteps head right back up onto the second floor, bypassing everything else. Just for him.

He doesn’t deserve all of that.

But he’s going to take it.

—

—

—

He makes sure not to let the basement consume him.

It would be really easy, to lose himself down here. He knows that’s why the others never stay down here as long as he does. It’s dark, and dusty, still shadowy in the corners. He’s cleaned out one room, which Tanis sort of unintentionally claimed, and is on the fast track to a second. No one’s pushing him to, but they’re not exactly stopping him either.

Dimara’s taken to watching him like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t spend all of his time down there. He makes sure to eat with them, to sit with them. It’s only when some of them trickle outside that he dares to go back down, because it’s not like he can go with them.

The second room empties out. There’s enough old furniture down here to fill the place, to set everyone up down here for life. Or longer than that.

Half the house is still awake when he ventures back upstairs, en route to his room. He doesn’t spend nearly as much time up there anymore; no point to it. But he’s starting to miss it, the only space that really still feels like it belongs to him.

This isn’t just a house anymore, with one used room. It’s an actual home, inhabited by people who are so desperately trying to make it feel like one.

Now his room is the only part that doesn’t look lived in. There’s a fine layer of dust over everything, everything in the closet and wardrobe untouched save for the few things he pulls back out on a regular basis, so Dimara stops getting on his case about wearing the same few things. She’s started to show him places they could go on her laptop, when Tanis hasn’t stolen it. Things that he could get. He starts to let himself get excited, about the prospect of actually going, and hopes that it’s not all for nothing.

Someone knocks on the door not ten minutes into his very complicated journey of lying face down in his pillows. Nadir pokes her head in, and he hastens to sit up at least a little bit. Not that it really makes a difference.

It’s not the same with her as it is with Tanis. Tanis just kind of inserted herself into the middle of all his business and he had to let her, unless he wants to stay stuck in here for all of eternity. Nadir’s a mystery, and it doesn’t make him feel any better that pretty much everyone else feels the same way.

She’s the same way he was, when everyone first showed up. Wary and withdrawn, trying to protect herself from something that isn’t even a threat. She’s much the same with everyone else, so he’s trying not to take it personally. Like he said, he was the same way.

“Do you actually need to sleep?” she asks, and he can tell that wasn’t on her mind, until she walked in here.

“No.”

“But you can.”

“Kind of?” he says. “I can close my eyes, but I don’t really go to sleep. I’m still aware of everything going on around me, it just goes by faster.”

“Like when you’re tired and almost ready to drop off but can’t?”

“Yeah. It’s nice, sometimes. Sorta relaxing.”

With how much everyone in this house sleeps, it’s no wonder he sticks out so much, just from that alone. Like how Nadir is right now, leaning against his door. She raps her fingers against the edge of it, and glances towards the window. Can’t see much from out this way – the woods are further away than out front. It’s just a large, rolling hill, the meadow sprawling out in front of him until the trees hit, far away in the distance.

And Tanis, rather close to the house, doing god knows what. Staring at the house, mostly, and looking frustrated.

“What’s she doing?” he asks.

Nadir shrugs. “Stopped asking months ago. You probably shouldn’t either; it never makes any sense. She just wanted me to check on you. Make sure you were fine.”

“Should I not be?”

“No idea. Like I said, better not to ask. I don’t know what she’s doing. Maybe she expects you to feel a difference, if it works. But we’re not gonna actually know until it happens, I guess.”

He rolls out of bed and strides to the window, sliding it open. Tanis looks up at the noise and makes a face. Apparently, the book in her hand isn’t doing wonders for her.

He already knows what’s going to happen, before he even dares to lift his hand up, but he still tries. Like always his hand comes into contact with something that isn’t even really there, flattening along an invisible window pane like he hadn’t even opened it in the first place. He can feel the cool air against his palm, hear the last of the birds before the sun sets, but his hand doesn’t move an inch.

Tanis still looks very frustrated. “I’m gonna figure it out!”

He watches her tromp back to the left side of the house, disappearing back up onto the porch, but can’t bring himself to close the window. It already feels like it’s closed, anyway.

“That’s not the worst view to have, for seventy-two years,” Nadir says.

“You don’t think so?”

“Been to a lot of places. Seen a lot of views. It may not be the best one I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely not the worst.”

The issue is, this is the only view he’s ever had. There’s so many things out there that he’s never laid eyes on. The entire place he grew up in is different now, cities built up around it and towering into the sky. He’s only seen the briefest snippets of it on the news, heard even less than that from the others. Probably because they don’t want to tell him about things he doesn’t have the ability to experience for himself.

“You’ll have a new view pretty soon.”

“That’s not set in stone.”

“I think it is,” Nadir assures him. “Just have some faith.”

“I wish I could be that sure.”

“Like I said, I’ve seen a lot of shit. Kinda have to take a gamble on some things, when you’ve been alive as long as I have.”

He looks at her. Same age as most of the other people in this house, but apparently not. You’d never know it, looking at her.

“You’ve got Kelsea beat?” he asks.

“Her, and Blair. By a long mile.”

“So, you’re immortal?”

“Technically speaking?” she says. “I’ve died, believe me. Multiple times; way too many if you ask me. But I’ve never stayed dead. Never have any proof that I even died – no marks, no scars. And there’s nothing to tell me if there will ever be a last time it happens, either.”

He wants to ask her how many times but can’t bring the words out. His hand finds his own neck, subconsciously, fingers brushing along the long inches of bruising stretching all the way around his throat. Nadir’s looking, too, even if she may not be able to see it as clearly as he’s memorized it. It’s hard not to, with so little to do in such a long time.

She smiles wryly. “Take comfort in the fact that if I had marks, we’d match.”

There’s no formal goodbye, no indication that Nadir’s about to leave, but the door clicks shut behind her without him turning around to look at her. That was a lot for her. It’s still a lot for him. But he knows she’s right – it’s not the worst view to have.

But he’s sure there are better things out there.

Worse, too.

But he’s willing to take the bad things, if he gets the good.

—

—

—

It’s the thunderstorm that brings him back from the verge of almost-sleep.

He had heard it, vaguely, coming in from the ocean, a place too far away for him to see. The rain had started up gradually, faint patters against the roof before it had turned into an all-out downpour. Occasionally the room would flash with lightning, turning everything pale white around him for a brief second.

The lamp in the corner of the room keeps flickering, the seconds between lit and unlit growing longer as the thunder and lightning grows closer. Finally, a boom of thunder so loud he jumps shakes the entire house and rattles the lamp. A spike of lightning bursts out across the meadow, and the bulb finally dies.

The rain is still loud, deafeningly so, but the house goes deathly silent.

Mostly, save for the footsteps coming pounding down the hall. Tanis throws his door open and nearly goes skidding across the floor she flings herself into his room so fast. It’s no wonder. She’s soaked to the bone, leaving wet footprints behind her, and she grabs at the doorknob to steady herself.

“Come on, get up,” she insists. “I think I did it.”

“What?”

“I think I did it,” she repeats, and the smile grows on her face. “Come on, I’m serious.”

He doesn’t get much of a choice, because a second later she reaches over and grabs both of his arms, dragging him off the bed. He’s hardly able to get his legs underneath him before she’s dragging him out of his room and down the hall. Everyone else must have gone to sleep before the power flickered out, because there’s no one wandering around. Not even Blair.

He finally pulls himself free from her grasp at the bottom of the stairs, but she doesn’t stop. She continues right down the hall and back out the still-open front door. The entryway is soaked, the rain blowing at a harsh angle and seeping along the floor.

Tanis stops on the porch and turns around to look at him. “Get out here.”

“What did you do?”

“Broke whatever boundary issues were going on. I think.”

“How sure are you?”

“Ninety-nine percent?” she guesses. “I’ve tried like, a dozen things, but this is the first time I’ve felt a difference. Do you feel anything?”

He shakes his head. He woke up from the thunder and the lightning, not anything else. Right? That’s what he had thought. He doesn’t feel any different. Maybe there’s something going on, something inside him that’s different, but he can’t tell.

The words _trial and error_ come to mind. That’s what Dimara had said, when they’d gotten back. That it might take a few times for Tanis to figure this out. She said she’s tried a dozen things, but this is the first time she’s come to get him.

The first time she’s sounded certain, since he’s met her.

But all of a sudden he’s terrified. More scared than he’s been in a very long time. He could take one step and be out there next to her. It feels like it should be more monumental than that. Like he _should_ feel a difference, no matter how small.

Tanis holds out her hand. “Try.”

He’ll have to reach pass the threshold to grab onto her. That will be proof in itself, if he could just find the courage to raise his arm. His hands are shaking, or maybe that’s just the house. He certainly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Tanis doesn’t sigh or roll her eyes. That’s what he would expect her to do, as painful as this must be for her to experience. All he wanted was to get outside, to be out there freer than he’s been since he died, and now he can’t move.

She doesn’t do any of those things, so he doesn’t see it coming when she leans forward and yanks him out.

Yanks him out.

His feet stumble right across the threshold.

He slams into her, out on the porch.

He nearly goes spinning right past her and down the stairs, but she locks her hands around her arms and holds him there. He stares down at the ground, at the soaked wooden porch underneath his feet, at the spray of rain misting over his skin. He looks back towards the door, a foot or two away. Further than he could reach.

“I am not gonna lie,” Tanis says slowly, voice clearly strained. “I was more like sixty percent, but I didn’t want to say that to your face.”

He starts laughing.

Tanis lets go of him to take a step back and look him over, and then starts laughing herself, something hysterical to it. It’s a good thing he technically doesn’t need to breathe, because he’s not at all right now. That feeling, the one that feels strangely like crying, is threatening to resurface.

“Okay, hold on,” Tanis says, still laughing. “Stay here, I’m gonna get everyone else, hold on.”

She skirts around him and back into the house, calling out for everyone before she’s even hit the stairs back up. He feels like he could be rooted to this very spot for the rest of his life, but very slowly his feet start to slide closer to the stairs, hardly moving. He raises his hand, trembling like a leaf, and as soon as it leaves the cover of the roof it’s soaked instantly, the rain collecting rapidly in the palm of his hand.

He takes a nervous step forward onto the first step, and the rain slams into him like a freight train, nearing glacial in temperature. Finally, something colder than he is. He reaches up to pull his hood down and it comes to rest on his shoulders. The rain soaks into his scalp and drips down his neck, rolling all the way down his spine.

He’s covered in goosebumps, a feat he didn’t even know he was still capable of. A glance up shows only the dark sky, the clouds still rolling in across the hills. The rain splatters all over his face, but it feels gentler than before. Safer. Like he’s supposed to be standing here, like this was supposed to happen all along.

Fate, luck. Or destiny.

He’s not standing inside the house, not confined by a set of walls and an invisible boundary.

He’s not standing inside the house, but it feels like finding home anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks all for reading. Part 2 will be up in mid-December.


End file.
